Port your sites to Drupal 9
With Drupal 9 on the way(3rd, June 2020), that means we should prepare to port our sites by keeping all the dependencies, libraries and modules, up to date.
Everywhere I go I hear: "Keep up with Drupal 8 and you are prepared for an EASY 9 upgrade."
Why is this?
Drupal 8 depends on Symfony 3 and we are preparing for it' s END of LIFE in November 2021. Regarding this change, the new major release of Drupal will be Drupal 9 which will depend on Symfony 4.
So we'll keep in mind a few things that are important:
1. The minimum Symfony version will be 4.
2. The PHP requirement will be at least 7.2 or higher. See (https://symfony.com/doc/current/reference/requirements.html)
3. Some deprecated modules will be removed:
- "action" module will be renamed to action_ui https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2083649
- "block_place" module will be removed (maybe it will be part of block module) https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3062281
- "field_layout" module will be replaced by layout_builder https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3007167
- "simpletest" module will be renamed to phpunit_ui https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2083649
4. All deprecated code will be removed, an example will be the function file_unmanaged_copy which copies a file to a new location without database changes or hook invocation.
function file_unmanaged_copy($source, $destination = NULL, $replace = FILE_EXISTS_RENAME) {
@trigger_error('file_unmanaged_copy() is deprecated in Drupal 8.7.0 and will be removed before Drupal 9.0.0. Use \\Drupal\\Core\\File\\FileSystemInterface::copy(). See https://www.drupal.org/node/3006851.', E_USER_DEPRECATED);
try {
$file_system = \Drupal::service('file_system');
// Build a destination URI if necessary.
if (!isset($destination)) {
$destination = file_build_uri($file_system
->basename($source));
}
return $file_system
->copy($source, $destination, $replace);
} catch (FileException $e) {
return FALSE;
}
}
This function will be removed before Drupal 9.0.0 . Instead we will use the following service:
\Drupal::service('file_system')->copy($source, $destination);
An advantage of using it will be the dependency injection using the container.
5. Drupal 8.8 is the last version to deprecate for Drupal 9.
6. Drupal 7 sites don't need to wait until 9, that's because Drupal 9 is identical with Drupal 8.
7. Use the drupal-check tool for checking deprecations of Drupal code and discover bugs https://github.com/mglaman/drupal-check/
“The first release of Drupal 9 will be very similar to the last minor release of Drupal 8, as the primary goal of the Drupal 9.0.0 release will be to remove deprecated code and update third-party dependencies. By keeping your Drupal 8 sites up to date, you should be well prepared for Drupal 9.” - Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
Documentation: drupal.org/docs/9
