Drupal 9 beta release and module compatibility status

If we look for example at the state of our Primer distribution we see that 44 of the 75, or 58% of the modules used now have either a stable or a development release that is D9 compatible. 31% of the modules have patches that are waiting to be committed. And work is needed on only 11% of those modules. These numbers are based on deprecation inspection tools and automated tests, so it’s likely that new issues will surface with manual reviews after the update. 

We maintain or help maintain 5 of the 10 most used D8 modules, therefore we have focused especially on those. All of these 5 modules are now Drupal 9 compatible. Besides that, almost half (49%) of the 47 modules we maintain are D9 compatible and 21% have issues ready, leaving 30% needing additional work. 

Next steps

We are committed to pushing the D9 readiness effort further on both the modules we help maintain and the ones we use. 

We already started testing with the current Drupal 9 branch and identifying various issues that didn't surface from either drupal-check or simpletest runs. That already lead to fixing multiple issues in the install profile itself, as well as some issues in the modules we use.

We are also available for consulting with updating sites to Drupal 9 as well as working on specific contributed projects.

When can projects use Drupal 9?

As we’ve explained in a previous blog post, most projects will likely be able to update to Drupal 9 quite soon after the initial release. Still, many projects use dozens to a hundred or more contributed projects and every single one of them will need to be Drupal 9 compatible (at the very least, that involves defining that in its .info.yml file).

Until that is the case for all dependencies of a project, we recommend to build projects based on Drupal 8.8 and 8.9 once it is released. Ensure not to use any deprecated APIs in custom code, keep an eye on Drupal 9 compatibility when deciding on which modules to use and update once it is possible. Almost all APIs from Drupal core are also available in Drupal 8.8 and 8.9, with the exception of the underlying frameworks like Symfony, Twig and JS libraries.

Drupal 9 testing for early adopters

To start testing Drupal 9 in our projects, you can use an alias to install it as Drupal 8 for the modules that do not yet declare themselves as compatible with Drupal 9:

composer require "drupal/core:9.0.0-beta1 as 8.8.4"

However, be prepared to also require a lot of development versions and extra patches in the current state.