Overview

This series will cover the modern tools and techniques available to Drupal site-builders that have replaced the old standards like FTP and even Drush Make.

We'll use tools like Composer, Drush, Git, and Configuration Management and see how they all work together to make your Drupal 8 site development and management process faster, more efficient, and less error prone.

Specifically, we'll talk about how to use Composer to build a site locally as well as on a production server, and how to use Configuration Management to develop locally, and then push final changes to a production server

While building a site with Composer, we'll use the new official drupal.org packagist repo that just came out of beta.

Prerequisites

Required

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

I won't go over installing Composer or Git, but you will need to have them installed in order to follow along, or use these techniques later.

Optional (but recommended)

  • Drush is optional (since we'll install a site-specific instance as a part of this project), but having it installed globally will make your life easier.

  • Drupal Console, like Drush, is optional for the same reason. But again, having it installed globally will make yor life easier.