What happens to Drupal 8 now that Drupal 9 has been released?

Last updated on

31 July 2020

Drupal 8 Long-Term Support

Drupal 8 is dependent on Symfony 3, and Symfony 3's end of life is November 2021. Consequently, Drupal 8 support will end in November 2, 2021. A long-term-support (LTS) Drupal 8.9 minor release was released alongside Drupal 9 and will be supported until November 2021. Drupal 8 will only receive patch releases following Drupal 9.0.0's release. No new features will be added to Drupal 8, nor will minor releases be made available.

Upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9

Upgrading to Drupal 9 is a matter of running update.php so long as your codebase does not use deprecated APIs. There are tools available that will identify and fix deprecated APIs in your codebase. You can also work on Drupal.org with the maintainers of contributed projects and themes to make those projects Drupal 9-compatible. Many project pages have a Drupal 9 plan issue linked in a dedicated section. Status of contributed projects can be followed in the deprecation status tracker.