D8 Composer-based starter project

Forked from https://github.com/mtechllc/d8_starter

This project template should provide a kickstart for managing your site dependencies with Composer.

If you want to know how to use it as replacement for Drush Make visit the Documentation on drupal.org.

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 run composer from the root of the project:

composer install

This project uses the fine Drupal VM project provided by jeffgeerling. So after running composer, you need to run vagrant.

vagrant up

After vagrant, then the fun starts. Here's a small sample.

drush @d8-custom-migrate.dev uli # Create a one-time login link.
drush @d8-custom-migrate.dev mi --all # Migrate all the things.
drush @d8-custom-migrate.dev ssh # SSH into the vagrant box.

What does the composer 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 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.

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 modfied files are updated in a new release of Drupal core.

Follow the steps below to update your core files.

1. Run composer update drupal/core.
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.

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 to patch"
        }
    }
}