Composer template for CS Drupal projects

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

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 install the project:

composer install

What does the template do?

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

• Drupal will be installed in the public-directory.
• Autoloader is implemented to use the generated composer autoloader in vendor/autoload.php, instead of the one provided by Drupal (public/vendor/autoload.php).
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in public/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in public/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in public/profiles/contrib/
• Creates default writable versions of settings.php and services.yml.
• Creates public/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.
• Latest version of deployer is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/dep.
• Creates environment variables based on your .env file. See .env.example.

Updating Drupal Core

This project will attempt to keep all of your Drupal Core files up-to-date; the project drupal/core-composer-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 composer update "drupal/core-*" --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 public 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.

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 section of composer.patches.json:

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

How do I specify a PHP version ?

This project supports PHP 7.4.9 as minimum version (see Environment requirements of Drupal 9), however it's possible that a composer update will upgrade some package that will then require PHP 7.4+.

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": {
    ...
    "platform": {
        "php": "7.4.9"
    }
},