Tour the Configuration System

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.