Composer template for Drupal projects

This project template provides a starter kit for managing your site and environment dependencies with Composer and Docker.

It is an opinionated fork of Drupal Project with elements of docker4drupal.

This is a non-production package meant to be a quick start best practices in Drupal, while a proper CI/CD and docker images are being developed. Using this package as is may lead to build issues later on. Always prioritize building your own docker application images (perhaps using the excellent docker4drupal package this starter is built on) to practice a proper CI/CD.

It assumes you are developing on OS X however you can review the .env and docker-compose volume keys to work with a linux distribution of choice. docker4drupal docs for OSX

Usage

First you need to install composer.

Note: The instructions below refer to the global composer installation. You might need to replace composer with php composer.phar (or similar) for your setup.

After that you can create the project:

composer create-project bixal/drupal-project:8.x-dev some-dir --stability dev --no-interaction

After that you can run make composer. The provided Makefile has 2 commands you may run for installing composer dependencies:

make install # To run a normal composer install.

or

make install-source # To install composer dependencies with source to work on contributed projects.

Installing from source can take several minutes or more depending on your network connection.

Then copy .env.example to .env:

cp .env.example .env

Edit your /etc/hosts file:

sudo sh -c "echo '127.0.0.1 mysitename' >> /etc/hosts"

Replace mysitename with PROJECT_BASE_URL in .env

Finally make up:

make up

You should be able to navigate to mysitename.localhost:8000

With docker-compose run php composer require ... you can download new dependencies to your installation.

cd some-dir
docker-compose run php composer require drupal/devel:~1.0

The composer create-project command passes ownership of all files to the project that is created. You should create a new git repository, and commit all files not excluded by the .gitignore file.

What does the template do?

When installing the given composer.json some tasks are taken care of:

• Drupal will be installed in the web-directory.
• Autoloader is implemented to use the generated composer autoloader in vendor/autoload.php, instead of the one provided by Drupal (web/vendor/autoload.php).
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in web/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/contrib/
• Creates default writable versions of settings.php and services.yml.
• Creates web/sites/default/files-directory.
• Latest version of drush is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drush.
• Latest version of DrupalConsole is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drupal.
• Provides .env.example which can be copied to .env for environment variables.

Updating Drupal Core

This project will attempt to keep all of your Drupal Core files up-to-date; the project drupal-composer/drupal-scaffold is used to ensure that your scaffold files are updated every time drupal/core is updated. If you customize any of the "scaffolding" files (commonly .htaccess), you may need to merge conflicts if any of your modified files are updated in a new release of Drupal core.

Follow the steps below to update your core files.

1. Run docker-compose run php composer update drupal/core webflo/drupal-core-require-dev symfony/* --with-dependencies to update Drupal Core and its dependencies.
2. Run git diff to determine if any of the scaffolding files have changed. Review the files for any changes and restore any customizations to .htaccess or robots.txt.
3. Commit everything all together in a single commit, so web will remain in sync with the core when checking out branches or running git bisect.
4. In the event that there are non-trivial conflicts in step 2, you may wish to perform these steps on a branch, and use git merge to combine the updated core files with your customized files. This facilitates the use of a three-way merge tool such as kdiff3. This setup is not necessary if your changes are simple; keeping all of your modifications at the beginning or end of the file is a good strategy to keep merges easy.

Generate composer.json from existing project

With using the "Composer Generate" drush extension you can now generate a basic composer.json file from an existing project. Note that the generated composer.json might differ from this project's file.

FAQ

Should I commit the contrib modules I download?

Composer recommends no. They provide argumentation against but also workrounds if a project decides to do it anyway.

Should I commit the scaffolding files?

The drupal-scaffold plugin can download the scaffold files (like index.php, update.php, …) to the web/ directory of your project. If you have not customized those files you could choose to not check them into your version control system (e.g. git). If that is the case for your project it might be convenient to automatically run the drupal-scaffold plugin after every install or update of your project. You can achieve that by registering @composer drupal:scaffold as post-install and post-update command in your composer.json:

"scripts": {
    "post-install-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ],
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ]
},

How can I apply patches to downloaded modules?

If you need to apply patches (depending on the project being modified, a pull request is often a better solution), you can do so with the composer-patches plugin.

To add a patch to drupal module foobar insert the patches section in the extra section of composer.json:

"extra": {
    "patches": {
        "drupal/foobar": {
            "Patch description": "URL or local path to patch"
        }
    }
}

How do I switch from packagist.drupal-composer.org to packages.drupal.org?

Follow the instructions in the documentation on drupal.org.

How do I specify a PHP version ?

Currently Drupal 8 supports PHP 5.5.9 as minimum version (see Drupal 8 PHP requirements), however it's possible that a composer update will upgrade some package that will then require PHP 7+.

To prevent this you can add this code to specify the PHP version you want to use in the config section of composer.json:

"config": {
    "sort-packages": true,
    "platform": {"php": "5.5.9"}
},