Composing Drupal 8

Drupal 8 is on track to be launched this year, already many individuals and companies are starting to think about how they’re going to use it.

All most all of my working life with Drupal (over 7 years) has been with enterprise level companies and organisations, the way they use Drupal is very different to individuals and small / medium sized businesses. I am currently thinking about how Drupal 8 will be used for clients and working on core issues which will assist these workflows.

Composer is one of the key elements of most PHP frameworks these days, it manages all packages and third-party dependencies. For the individuals and small / medium sized businesses using Drupal 8 many will not even know what composer is or that it’s used, this needs to be taken into account when making changes to Drupal core. However the enterprise organisations are more likely to have in house teams or partners who will make use of composer to manage their Drupal install(s).

I’ve been looking how we can potentially have very small repos for each site, then using composer pull in Drupal and any other dependencies on every deployment or automated test. Currently this cannot be done, and the current hurdle is that everyone won’t be doing it this way, which is kind of obvious. What makes it harder is not everyone will be Composer in any form.

Hopefully we can make Drupal 8 clever enough that when a `composer update` is done it doesn’t unintentionally override and manually added code, and when a manual update is done it doesn’t unintentionally update any code managed by composer.

There’s lots of exciting things ahead but it’s great to see Drupal falling in line with the rest of the PHP community.

I’m hoping to present on a similar theme at DrupalCon Barcelona.
Improving the use of Composer in Drupal 8
Developing for Enterprise Drupal