gabesullice / drupal-contributor-project

Stability: ALPHA

Drupal Contributor Project

The Drupal Contributor Project is a composer project template for Drupal core and contrib maintainers.

Drupal's official installation instructions recommend that Drupal be installed using Composer. However, when Drupal is installed using this method, it is difficult to develop core patches because the resulting root directory is not equivalent to a direct Git clone of the Drupal project.

Many times, to make Drupal contribution easier, it is simpler to do direct Git checkouts of Drupal core and/or contributed projects. However, that approach has many drawbacks. One must customize git ignore files, one cannot easily manage a module's composer dependencies, and any patches required by a module that are included in a composer.json file are not automatically applied. Thus, many Drupal contributors choose not to use Composer for their day-to-day workflow. This can often lead to bugs in composer.json and out-of-date composer.json files.

This project is an attempt to make all that better. It does so by establishing a Composer project that uses Git checkouts and symlinks to create a directory structure that is conducive to Drupal contributions and a composer-based workflow.

The trade-off is a somewhat brittle installation that is likely not suitable for "real", production Drupal applications.

Usage

It's simple, replace the placeholder and run this single command:

composer create-project -s dev --repository='{"type":"vcs","url":"[e-mail]:gabesullice/drupal-contributor-project.git"}' drupal/contributor-project {{ PROJECT_NAME }}

To develop a module that lives on Drupal.org, simply require it:

composer require drupal/cdn

Note: If your contrib module applies patches to Drupal core, you must run composer update after requiring it.

The resulting directory structure will look like this:

composer.json
contrib
 ↳  modules
     ↳  cdn
         ↳  .git
  themes
  profiles
  libraries
web
 ↳  .git
    index.php
    sites
     ↳  default
         ↳  default.settings.php
            files
            # etc.
    modules
     ↳  contrib -> ../../contrib/modules     # symlink to the top-level contrib/modules directory.
    themes
     ↳  themes -> ../../contrib/themes       # symlink.
    profiles
     ↳  profiles -> ../../contrib/profiles   # symlink.
    libraries
     ↳  libraries -> ../../contrib/libraries # symlink.
    vendor -> ../vendor                      # symlink.
    # etc.
vendor
 ↳  bin
    autoload.php
    # etc.

Wait... but how does it?

• Allow you to generate patches using git while also adding things to the git checkout?
  • I'm glad you asked! The gabesullice/drupal-contrib-installer plugin required by this project's composer.json automatically adds exclusions to the web/.git/info/exclude file. Thus, any unwanted changes caused by this project's structure will not appear in your core patches.

Built with 💙 by @TravisCarden & @GabeSullice at @Acquia.