Composer based Thunder installation

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

Usage

See our install documentation on how to use Thunder project. We also have documentation on extending and updating Thunder sites.

What does the template do?

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

• Drupal will be installed in the docroot-directory.
• Autoloader is implemented to use the generated composer autoloader in vendor/autoload.php, instead of the one provided by Drupal (docroot/vendor/autoload.php).
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in docroot/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in docroot/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in docroot/profiles/contrib/
• Downloads Drupal scaffold files such as index.php, or .htaccess
• Creates sites/default/files-directory.
• Latest version of drush is installed locally for use at bin/drush.
• Latest version of DrupalConsole is installed locally for use at bin/drupal.

File update

This project will attempt to keep all of your Thunder and 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 thunder files.

1. Run composer update
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 docroot 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 extra section of composer.json:

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

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 @drupal-scaffold as post-install and post-update command in your composer.json:

"scripts": {
    "drupal-scaffold": "DrupalComposer\\DrupalScaffold\\Plugin::scaffold",
    "post-install-cmd": [
        "@drupal-scaffold",
        "..."
    ],
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "@drupal-scaffold",
        "..."
    ]
},

How can I prevent downloading modules from Thunder, that I do not need?

To prevent downloading a module, that Thunder provides but that you do not need, add a replace block to your composer.json:

"replace": {
    "drupal/features": "*"
}

This example prevents any version of the feature module to be downloaded.