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Moving data to Drupal 8

Moving Up

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Caleb Thorne

The Migrate API in Drupal 8 provides a suite of modules designed to help you move your data between Drupal versions or into Drupal 8 from outside sources.

Moving data from a different technology, such as migrating an old website from Drupal 6 or importing a database of news articles into Drupal 8, can be a daunting task. In Drupal 7, data migrations were possible using the contributed Migrate [1] module. The new Migrate API in Drupal 8 is based on the same methodologies for moving your data into Drupal (see the "Experimental Status" box). The Migrate API is excellent for upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 and for one-time imports of large datasets. In this article, I look briefly at Drupal-to-Drupal upgrades and provide an in-depth example of migrations, including custom Source, Destination, and Process plugins.

Experimental Status

The Migrate API is still considered experimental (alpha stability) as of Drupal 8.1. At some point, it will be fully supported, but for now, you need to keep a few things in mind:

There may be bugs (including security and data integrity issues).
There is no guarantee of backward compatibility. The API could change with any patch.
There is no upgrade path between updates. You will need to uninstall and reinstall the module after applying updates.

This doesn't mean that the Migrate API is useless in its current state. Far from it. Drupal 8 has all the tools necessary to import your data.

Drupal-to-Drupal Upgrades

The Migrate API comprises three modules in Drupal 8 core (Figure 1). You might need to enable one, two, or all three modules depending on your requirements. The Migrate module contains the main API used to define and run migrations. Migrate Drupal provides plugins for upgrading from an older version of

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