Upgrade Drupal 6 to Drupal 8!

The amazing team at Acquia have done it, and added support for upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. Natively supporting a full migration that bypasses Drupal 7 altogether.

And the best part is that it’s actually quite easy! So, assuming you have a proper webserver setup:

1. Install Drush: http://docs.drush.org/en/master/install/
2. Create your Drupal database
3. Install Drupal and migrate from your previous D6 install:

$ drush si standard --db-url=mysql:user:pass@hostname/dbname
$ drush dl drupal /path/to/html && cd /path/to/html
$ drush site-install standard --db-url=mysql://user:password@hostname/db
$ drush dl migrate_upgrade features -y
$ drush en migrate_upgrade features -y
$ drush migrate-upgrade --legacy-db-url=mysql::user:password@hostname/db --legacy-root=http://mysite.dev --legacy-db-prefix=drupal6_

Keep in mind there are still a few major drawbacks, so it’s not entirely done at this point:

• entityreference, user_reference and node_reference will not have migrated
  • Also a timesaver: The bundle column in field tables will correspond to the node type in D8, rather than simply node
• User profile images will more than likely be null and require a re-upload depending on how your previous public/private file system was setup in Drupal 6
• Views will not be migrated as they’ve been restructured and worked directly into Drupal core

Happy migrating, and as always if I can help let me know!