Tour the Configuration System
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Tour the Configuration System
Kyle Hofmeyer
In this tutorial, we're going to
tour the Configuration System.
One of the things we're going to do, is we're
going to take a look at the module settings.
Basically we're going to see that the
Configuration System is run by
a new module called the
Configuration Manager.
We're going to look at a synchronization
status screen that shows us if we have
any synchronizations that
need to be made or not.
We're going to look at some import
settings, some export settings,
and what it means to do a full
archive versus a single item sync.
So let's get started and take a
tour of the Configuration System.
In order for the Configuration System to
work, we need to make sure that the
Configuration Manager module is enabled.
Through a typical Drupal installation,
this is done, but let's just go ahead and see
where it is and make sure it is already enabled.
So now we go under
Extend, and scroll down
and we have a module for core
called Configuration Manager.
This is the module that handles
our configuration management.
Once this module is enabled, all our
settings are under Configuration,
Configuration synchronization, and
everything happens on this page
within these three tabs:
Synchronize, Import and Export.
On this tab, the Synchronize tab, we would see if we had any synchronizations that need to happen.
A synchronization is basically a difference
between a import that we brought in,
and what is stored in the database, and
if there are changes or if there are differences,
we will be told what they are
and you can see the differences.
That's what the
Synchronize tab does.
This is what the Synchronize
status page would look like
if we have a difference between our
current system and what we're importing.
This is basically showing us that there are changes that have been made toward configurations.
We can see what is changed,
in this instance it was a view,
and we can also click and
see what the differences are.
So it's basically almost like a diff
for seeing our configuration changes.
What is great about the
Synchronization System,
using the UI it's actually pretty easy
to make a synchronize happen.
Again, a synchronization is really just exporting
all the settings that you've done locally usually,
and importing them into another system,
usually your production system.
If we go to the Import tab, this is where
we grab a file from a different system,
and we would import it by choosing the
zip that we got from an export.
We have two things we can do, we
can do a full archive or a single item.
Typically we almost always want to do
a full archive. The main reason is
you may not be aware that some
modules have made changes,
and if you only bring in part of the changes,
things just aren't going to work properly.
A single item, sometimes you may want to
do this if you know exactly you're just
importing or exporting,
let's say just a simple view.
There we can go to Single item,
and you can choose what type
of configuration you want to do.
So if you wanted to do a view
you could just choose a view and we can do a
single import and even a single item export.
And then we can hand out that view to
another person or in other system.
So that's basically the difference between
a full archive and a single item,
and a full archive will export all of your
configurations whether they're changes or not.
That way you are sure that you have
everything in your export and in your import,
when it comes to moving your changes and
configurations from one system to another.
So to recap, in this tutorial we've looked at
a new configuration manager module
that comes with core which is what is
responsible for everything that we are doing
when it comes to synchronization
and configuration management.
We looked at the page that
contains the synchronization status.
We looked at import settings, we looked
at export settings and finally we discussed
the difference between a full
archive and a single item sync.