Maintain your developer portal

The Apigee Kickstart developer portal is based on the open source Drupal project. Drupal provides a core set of features in the form of modules that make it easy to manage content and functionality in your developer portal. Staying up to date with all recommended updates, patches, advisories, and best practices will provide developers using your portal with the best possible experience.

Update Drupal core and modules

To ensure that your Apigee Kickstart developer portal functions optimally, you may need to update Drupal core or Drupal core modules from time to time.

Composer is the supported tool for managing Drupal and its dependencies in your Kickstart developer portal. To understand how Composer manages Drupal dependencies, see Using Composer with Drupal.

Step-by-step instructions to Update core via Composer and Update modules are available on Drupal.org. If you need to update core manually or using Drush, you can find additional guidance at Updating Drupal.

Update Kickstart

In addition to updating Drupal core and its modules, you may need to install updates for your Kickstart distribution.  Follow these steps to update your Apigee Kickstart developer portal using Composer:

1. Create a backup of your site.
2. Confirm that you are using the latest version of Composer:

   composer self-update

3. Navigate to the root of your site:

   cd /path/to/MY_PROJECT/

4. Run the following command to update Drupal core, where:
   • --with-dependencies updates all project dependencies
   • --optimize-autoloader (optional) speeds up performance

   composer update --with-dependencies --optimize-autoloader

5. Update databases:

   ./vendor/bin/drush updb

6. Clear Drupal cache:

   ./vendor/bin/drush cr

7. Validate the update in your developer portal.
   • Navigate to your developer portal in the browser and confirm that the home page is available.
   • Try creating an app in your portal to confirm that the dependencies have updated successfully.

Stay informed

Stay informed about security and software updates by following Drupal security announcements and configuring your site to alert administrators when security updates are available.  Learn more by reading the Drupal documentation about keeping track of updates.  

Follow best practices

You can learn more about Drupal's best practices for coding standards and security on this page: https://www.drupal.org/developing/best-practices.