Updating your Drupal 6 website using Drush

I got the sample Drupal 6 website working on Quickstart. Now I want to update the modules and core using Drush.

My next step is to update all the Drupal 6 modules and Drupal core from 6.20 to 6.22. I changed directories to example6-dev and ran the command "drush update". I got the message asking if I really want to do this. Be sure to backup robots.txt and .htaccess files which will be over written. So I created a backups folder in example6_dev and made backup copies of robots.txt and .htaccess.

1. Before updating Drupal core, be sure to make backups of your code, especially robots.txt and .htaccess. These 2 files will be overwritten by the new version of Drupal core.

mkdir backups
cp robots.txt to backups/robots-prev.txt

cp .htaccess to backups/.htaccess-old

I'm new to using the command line to do file management, so I listed the commands above.

2. I typed the command "drush update". It worked but I received a message saying that the "update" command has been deprecated. Please use "drush pm-update" or "drush up".

None of the contributed modules have been enabled on this sample site, so none were flagged for updating. I went into the site admin panel and tuned on all the modules for CCK and Views. I also added a couple of my favourite modules, admin_menu and backup_migrate. I use them on every Drupal website and I wish they could be included in core.

drush dl admin_menu
# this command downloads the module admin_menu and installs it in the modules folder

drush en -y admin_menu
# this command enables the admin menu without having to navigate to the modules admin page of your site

My question is, how do I download Drupal 6.22 using Drush? I want to create a new fresh install of Drupal 6 using Drush. That will be the topic for my next blog post.