Configuration Management

Drupal has a unified way of storing your site's configuration. Its configuration system allows for a very effective development workflow, when leveraging tools like Drush and Git. It's not limited to developers however. The Drupal administrative UI provides forms for managing your site's configuration, too.

In this series of tutorials you'll learn all about the new configuration system in Drupal. You'll learn key concepts in configuration management and important skills like how to move configuration from local development to production.

In these tutorials, we'll use command-line tools like Drupal Console, Drush, and Git as well as GUI tools as an alternative toolchain for tasks like cloning a site and importing and exporting site configuration.

By the end of this series, you will understand how you can manage configuration between instances of your site.

To learn how to leverage configuration data in a module, see the tutorial series, Configuration Entities.

Tutorial

Overview of the Configuration System

Free
Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Drupal's configuration system helps to solve the problem of moving changes in configuration from development to production. It does this in two ways: by providing a unified way to store configuration and by providing a process by which configuration changes can be imported and exported between instances of the same site. The configuration system is the result of work completed within the Configuration Management Initiative (CMI).

In this introduction, we'll provide:

Tutorial

Configuration Sync Directory Setup

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Before we start synchronizing configuration, let's take a look at the default, out-of-the-box file location for staging and synchronizing configuration. Then we'll walk through how to change that directory to a location outside of our project's docroot and update settings.php appropriately.

In this tutorial, we'll cover:

Tutorial

Create a Clone of Your Drupal Site

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Before you can get started synchronizing configuration between instances of your site, you'll need to create a new instance or "clone" of your Drupal site.

By the end of this tutorial, you should know:

Tutorial

Clone a Drupal Site with GUI Tools

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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The configuration system in Drupal was designed to manage and sync configuration between instances of a Drupal site. So before configuration management can be useful, we must have another instance--or clone--of our Drupal site. In this lesson, you will learn:

Tutorial

Synchronize Configuration with the UI

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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The Configuration Manager module gives you as an administrator the ability to import and export configuration items on different instances of a Drupal site using an graphical user interface. In this tutorial, we'll take a tour of the Configuration Manager and the administrative interface it provides.

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

Tutorial

Synchronize Configuration with Drush

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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While the administrative UI for Configuration synchronization certainly provides a simple and effective means to export and import configuration, it is by no means the preferred method. The Drush command line utility provides the same functionality without the need for a web interface or the need to log in.

Goal

Be able to use Drush to export and import configuration on a Drupal site.

Tutorial

Inspect Configuration with Drush

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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There are some administrative UI tools for managing configuration, but some tasks can only be completed with Drush. As a site administrator, you will find Drush an indispensable tool for managing configuration between instances of the same site. Furthermore, Drush includes integration with Git in certain commands, enabling you to create a configuration workflow with Drush that also uses best practices in version control.

By the end of this lesson you should be able to:

Tutorial

Live vs. Local Configuration Management

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Using Drush to work with the Drupal Configuration System is straightforward when working locally. Navigate to the directory containing your site, then issue whatever Drush command you need.

Things become more complicated when multiple environments become involved. Often, a configuration change will need to be made on the production ("live") site and then need to be persisted to a Git repository later. When this occurs, Drush once more provides a solution in the form of the config-pull subcommand.

Tutorial

Configuration Interdependencies

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Drupal creates a line of separation between what is content and what is configuration. The line is such that content is stored only in the database, whereas configuration is maintained by the configuration management system. While cached to the database for performance reasons, configuration can be thought of primarily living in the sync directory as a series of flat files.

Tutorial

How to Override Configuration

Module Development, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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Not every environment or copy of a site you may be working on will be created equally. You may want to enable logging on a development site or need to use different API keys depending on the environment. But you also need to make sure that your instance-specific configuration overrides don't make it into the database, mistakenly get exported, or compromise security.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Tutorial

Set up and Use Configuration Split Module

Free
Site Administration, Drupal 9, Drupal 8, Drupal 10
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Modules like Devel or Stage File Proxy offer key advantages when developing locally, but should never be enabled on a production site. This poses a problem for Drupal as which modules are enabled is a configuration. Compounding this problem is the configuration provided by these modules, as well as key configuration that must be set differently locally compared to production.

Tutorial

Automate Deployment of Configuration

Site Administration, Drupal 8, Drupal 9, Drupal 10
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When automating the deployment of a Drupal site, it's critical to have a good understanding of the configuration management workflow in order for deployments to be consistent and successful.

Goal

To understand the best practices when creating automated deployment for a Drupal site with reguards to configuration.

Tutorial

Reimport Default Configuration during Development

Module Development, Drupal 9, Drupal 8, Drupal 10
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When working on configuration in a module, whether as part of a migration that uses Migrate Plus configuration entities, or while developing custom configuration entities, you'll often need to re-import the configuration stored in the .yml files of the modules config/install/ or config/optional/ directories. This is tricky though, because Drupal only reads in those default configuration settings when the module is first enabled. So any changes you make to those files after the module has been installed will not be reflected without these workarounds.