Composer template for Drupal projects with dev container

This project template provides a starter kit for managing your site dependencies with Composer. Additionally dev container configuration has been added so Drupal can be run with DDEV and Docker in a remote or dev container environment. Also, drush has been updated to the latest version.

Usage (with Docker and dev containers)

There are two configurations available with different Docker configuration. For Codespaces docker-in-docker is prefered, docker-outside-of-docker is more suitable for local dev containers.

Note: Local dev container setup looks for a self signed certificate under /home/vscode/.local/share/mkcert or creates one if it doesn't exists. The home folder from the host user is mounted in to container by default so certificates can be shared. Self signed root certificates need to be imported to the host system's trust store for web browser to pick them up (Firefox is not supported).On Codespaces, ddev router is disabled as a reverse proxy and HTTPS certificate is already being provded.

To start the project, run:

ddev start

To install Drupal the first time, run:

ddev drush site:install

Note: The local hosts file on the host needs to be updated manually to use host names generated by DDEV

Usage (manually, without Docker)

First you need to install Composer.

Note: The instructions below refer to the global Composer installation. You might need to replace composer with php composer.phar (or similar) for your setup.

After that you can create the project:

composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:10.x-dev some-dir --no-interaction

With composer require ... you can download new dependencies to your installation.

cd some-dir
composer require drupal/devel

The composer create-project command passes ownership of all files to the project that is created. You should create a new Git repository, and commit all files not excluded by the .gitignore file.

What does the template do?

When installing the given composer.json some tasks are taken care of:

• Drupal will be installed in the web-directory.
• Autoloader is implemented to use the generated composer autoloader in vendor/autoload.php, instead of the one provided by Drupal (web/vendor/autoload.php).
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in web/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/contrib/
• Creates default writable versions of settings.php and services.yml.
• Creates web/sites/default/files-directory.
• Latest version of drush is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drush.
• Latest version of DrupalConsole is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drupal.
• Creates environment variables based on your .env file. See .env.example.

Updating Drupal Core

This project will attempt to keep all of your Drupal Core files up-to-date; the project drupal/core-composer-scaffold is used to ensure that your scaffold files are updated every time drupal/core is updated. If you customize any of the "scaffolding" files (commonly .htaccess), you may need to merge conflicts if any of your modified files are updated in a new release of Drupal core.

Follow the steps below to update your core files.

1. Run composer update "drupal/core-*" --with-dependencies to update Drupal Core and its dependencies.
2. Run git diff to determine if any of the scaffolding files have changed. Review the files for any changes and restore any customizations to .htaccess or robots.txt.
3. Commit everything all together in a single commit, so web will remain in sync with the core when checking out branches or running git bisect.
4. In the event that there are non-trivial conflicts in step 2, you may wish to perform these steps on a branch, and use git merge to combine the updated core files with your customized files. This facilitates the use of a three-way merge tool such as kdiff3. This setup is not necessary if your changes are simple; keeping all of your modifications at the beginning or end of the file is a good strategy to keep merges easy.

FAQ

Should I commit the contrib modules I download?

Composer recommends no. They provide argumentation against but also workrounds if a project decides to do it anyway.

Should I commit the scaffolding files?

The Drupal Composer Scaffold plugin can download the scaffold files (like index.php, update.php, …) to the web/ directory of your project. If you have not customized those files you could choose to not check them into your version control system (e.g. git). If that is the case for your project it might be convenient to automatically run the drupal-scaffold plugin after every install or update of your project. You can achieve that by registering @composer drupal:scaffold as post-install and post-update command in your composer.json:

"scripts": {
    "post-install-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ],
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ]
},

How can I apply patches to downloaded modules?

If you need to apply patches (depending on the project being modified, a pull request is often a better solution), you can do so with the composer-patches plugin.

To add a patch to drupal module foobar insert the patches section in the extra section of composer.json:

"extra": {
    "patches": {
        "drupal/foobar": {
            "Patch description": "URL or local path to patch"
        }
    }
}

How do I specify a PHP version?

This project supports PHP 8.1 as minimum version (see Environment requirements of Drupal 10), however it's possible that a composer update will upgrade some package that will then require PHP 8.1+.

To prevent this you can add this code to specify the PHP version you want to use in the config section of composer.json:

"config": {
    "sort-packages": true,
    "platform": {
        "php": "8.1.13"
    }
},