Drupal’s Configuration System

Drupal's Configuration System William Hetherington In this lesson, we'll ask, why do we need to manage configuration? Then we're going to learn about Drupal's new configuration system and then take a look at a new workflow: configuration synchronization. So, why configuration management? Well, in Drupal 7, if you want to store your site configuration in code, you will need to be using a module like Features or CTools. The goal with Drupal 8 development was to provide a way out of the box to sync and store configuration in code and in the database. And that goes for your site's configuration, as well as any extensions, like themes or modules or plugins. They'll all use a unified way of storing configuration. And so the goal is to make the configuration system accessible to a wider audience, both developers and non-developers. It was announced as the first initiative for Drupal 8 in March 2011 and at the time it was known as Configuration Management Initiative. And I guess it still is during Drupal 8's development cycle. Now that it's released, we're referring to it as Drupal 8's configuration system. It provides a central way for your site and modules, themes and plugins to store configuration data. It's accessible via Drupal's administrative interface and via the Drupal command-line tool, Drush. So, what does the workflow look like? Well, with the Drupal 8 configuration system, you may have a development version of your site, and a staging version of your site and a production version of your site. Or maybe just development to production. The configuration system provides a simple way to share configuration changes between any of these environments really easily, particularly if you leverage rich tools like Drush and Git. So, configuration synchronization. It's the act of exporting or importing Drupal's configuration from one instance of a site to another. Your site's active configuration is stored in the database. And exporting your configuration encapsulates your site's configuration in YAML files. This gets exported to a directory that's defining your settings.php. So as a quick recap, we talked about why we need to manage configuration in a unified way, we talked about how Drupal's configuration system became a reality, and then introduced configuration synchronization.