Possible to do a clean install of Drupal, and for CiviCRM "not to miss a beat"?

[mdlueck]

Greetings,

For a client, they have an existing working installation of CiviCRM. Said instance has now a dedicated copy of Drupal to power it, separate subdomain and file system instance of Drupal than the production Drupal sites which are on other subdomains.

To arrive at the dedicated instance of Drupal to power CiviCRM, said instance was moved/renamed to be on just this one subdomain, and all Drupal content mothballed. A new clean Drupal installation was performed, nodes migrated, etc...

Result, a lot of left over nodes, modules, etc... all of which CiviCRM does not need.

Is there known steps to wipe the Drupal installation, reinstall clean Drupal, and then have the CiviCRM module install again and not cause damage to CiviCRM? Do I need to be concerned that Drupal user ID numbers stay the same as they were in the existing instance of Drupal? Fortunately this site does not use CiviCRM to provision Drupal user ID's, so there are just the site administrative Drupal accounts, and a very few of them in that case.

I have in mind to upgrade all the way to the latest CiviCRM while on the old instance of Drupal which is 6.x code, then when I do the clean install start with D7, and swap out the CiviCRM code to the corresponding release for D7. Any known complications with that part of what I am thinking to do? As far as CiviCRM should be concerned, I would think it would be a non-issue swapping out Civi-D6 to Civi-D7 code on the same version of CiviCRM.

I am thankful,

[JohnFF]

Hi Thankful,

A couple of things:

Wouldn't it be easier to remove all custom settings, including nodes and modules? I'm sure that there would be Drupal functionality to do this. If not, probably a contrib module. Upgrading to the latest d7 seems like a good idea though.

You need the drupal ids to be the same as they are currently if they are connected to civicrm via civicrm's 'external ids'. This would probably be the first thing to check. Otherwise, making a list and manually updating them may be best as you said there are not many.

You also need to see if your civicrm db and your drupal db are in the same database. It'll be much easier if they aren't!

[mdlueck]

Greetings John,

Upgrading to the latest d7 seems like a good idea though.

Clean install of D7 into a blank DB sounds much easier than cleaning the Drupal instance up and then doing the D6 --> D7 upgrade. 

You need the drupal ids to be the same as they are currently if they are connected to civicrm via civicrm's 'external ids'. This would probably be the first thing to check. Otherwise, making a list and manually updating them may be best as you said there are not many.

All right, so like I suspected, CiviCRM has tracked who is doing what based on the Drupal UID number. I will focus on making sure I am able to recreate the required Drupal accounts and obtain the correct UID numbers matching the current installation.

You also need to see if your civicrm db and your drupal db are in the same database. It'll be much easier if they aren't!

Indeed they are in separate databases.

I am thankful,

[JohnFF]

Hi Michael,

If you're going to do the D7 upgrade as well, probably the best thing for you to do is a dry run locally. I don't know if the DB structure for Civi is different from D6 to D7, although I can't imagine why it would be.

Do you have a local install you can play with? If you need to create one from scratch on a local machine, remember to scramble all the Civi data and Drupal passwords.

[mdlueck]

Greetings John,

I hope to have adequate memory to duplicate a test environment right on the production server, hide it under a subdomain.

I have upgraded as far as I can go on the old server hardware. At least now the site is up to security patch levels. I was only able to upgrade to Civi 4.3.4 on the legacy server as 4.3.5 update required a higher MySQL version, thus has to wait until on the new server hardware. Once there, I plan to upgrade all the way to current stable. Then duplicate production to a test environment, and work out how to wipe the Drupal installation powering the CiviCRM site, reinstall with fresh D7, then drop in the corresponding CiviCRM for D7, fiddle with the UID's, and see how it turns out. Once successful, perform the same on production, and breath a sigh of relief for a job well done! 

I am thankful,