With two days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

Drupal 8 was released on November 19th, 2015. The end of life comes on November 2, 2021, after almost 6 years of support. Is this too soon? I think the answer will be different from situation to situation. But why do we need to end of life Drupal 8 in the first place?

With three days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

Unless you are on Drupal 8.8.x or Drupal 8.9.x, Upgrade Status will tell you to move to that version first, before you can upgrade to Drupal 9. (At this point it should really tell you that 8.9.x is the only acceptable version to upgrade to). Why is that?

With four days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

With five days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

With six days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

While a lot of Drupal extensions are now compatible with Drupal 9, it can happen that you encounter an incompatible extension. In case adopting the extension fits into your plans, that is the best way forward. However, there may be some delay until you can adopt the project and it may not fit into your plans to adopt in the first place. There are a few solutions to use drupal.org projects that are distributed as incompatible on your Drupal 9 sites.

With seven days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

Various people in the Upgrade Status issue queue are concerned about the module requiring Composer though. While Drupal 8 or 9 do not require Composer to work, getting any extension installed on your site that depends on third party components is a sizeable challenge without Composer. With Drupal 8 core dependent on various third party components, it was inevitable that a dependency manager will be needed to build Drupal sites. Upgrade Status itself does require various third party components to check for deprecated API uses and even to locate your Drupal site root. So you cannot avoid using Composer to even check for Drupal 9 compatibility.

With eight days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. While more than 7 thousand modules are now Drupal 9 compatible, there are still various that are not yet compatible. However, most only need a one line change and a release or even if they need more, an automated fix is posted to their issue queue and is tested by the community.

With the Drupal 8 end of life in a little over two months and Drupal 10's release next year, this is the time of transitions again at Drupal. However, while Drupal 7 to 8 (or 9) was a big move, the transitions from 8 to 9 and 9 to 10 are much smaller and mostly automated.

Drupal 10 is planned to be released in June, August or December 2022 and the tools are getting ready to support that. The two key tools will be the same as the previous upgrade: Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.

Matt Glaman has been doing amazing work recently in the underlying components of both tools. Thanks to his work on updating phpstan-drupal for Drupal 10 support, Upgrade Status checks deprecated API uses on Drupal 9 too. Since my last update on that, I added reporting of deprecated modules and new system requirements as well.

I presented on the overall status of the Drupal 10 initiative in December at DrupalCon Europe. Then posted an update about the initiative one week ago on the Drupal Core blog.

More recently I worked on making Upgrade Status work meaningfully on Drupal 9 with Andrey Postnikov. Released Upgrade Status 8.x-3.5-alpha1 today to let you test this out. (You may need to use composer require --dev phpspec/prophecy-phpunit to make your phpunit setup complete).

How is this different from prior releases of Upgrade Status? It should run very similar on Drupal 8 as it did before. However prior releases of Upgrade Status explicitly forbid running it on Drupal 9 as the UI was very focused on the transition from 8 to 9. Now the UI elements are adapted and in some cases more general to support running either on Drupal 8 or 9.

I presented The Drupal 10 readiness initiative - here we go at DrupalCon Europe a month ago. While I published my slides with plenty speaker notes right away, the session videos just became public. While the live presentation was a month ago, most of the content is still up to date.