CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

You can upgrade CiviCRM by upgrading the entire starter kit or overriding the version of CiviCRM included in profiles/civicrm_starterkit/modules.  I try to get new releases of the CiviCRM Starter Kit packaged within 24 hours of a new CiviCRM release, but since I'm the only person maintaining the kit at this point I may not always be able to get the new version of CiviCRM packaged with Drupal as quickly as everyone wants.  (INSERT SHAMELESS PLUG FOR CO-MAINTAINERS HERE)

If the current packaged version of the starter kit includes the version of CiviCRM you want to upgrade to, you can do that by following the same process you'd use for upgrading Drupal core.  I use the command line to perform these updates and my process looks something like...

• Export mysql databases for Drupal (and CiviCRM if it is a separate db) using mysqldump
• From my website root (/var/www for me), download latest version of the CiviCRM Starter Kit using 'wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/civicrm_starterkit-7.x-3.1-rc3-core.tar.gz'
• Expand that archive 'tar -xvf civicrm_starterkit-7.x-3.1-rc3-core.tar.gz
• Rename my live site's dir 'mv sitename sitename-date'
• Raname civicrm_starterkit to live site dir 'mv civicrm_starterkit sitename'
• Copy my sites directory into updated directory 'cp sitename-date/sites sitename'
• Reset directory permissions
• Copy a mysql backup into sitename-date, compress it as a full backup
• Run update.php to update Drupal and any contrib modules and civicrm/upgrade to upgrade CiviCRM

If the packaged version of the starter kit hasn't been updated to include the version of CiviCRM you want, you can override the version in profiles/civicrm_starterkit/modules by adding a newer version to sites/all/modules.  If you do that, you'll want to follow the instructions for changing the location http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location

You can override any module included in a distribution this way.  Ideally, if everything works well with the new version or you find issues, you'd open an issue at http://drupal.org/project/issues/civicrm_starterkit letting everyone else know.  If even a few people do this, it will save new CiviCRM/Drupal users a lot of time and frustration.