Use of Composer (instead of Drush Make) for building Drupal site

[jasloe]

Just getting started with Drupal 8 and seeing that quite a few folks are using Composer to build. Any plans to include Composer support as a build option, instead of make?

[geerlingguy]

I would like to do this soon, yes; just waiting for things to standardize a little more. I know there is a more-or-less 'official' workflow now (see below references), but there is still differing opinions on best practices for some of the sticky bits, like versioning, patches, extra libraries (non-PHP), etc. so I'm not sure if this will be a feature by Drupal VM 3.0.0 or not.

References:

• Using Composer in a Drupal project
• Composer template for Drupal projects

The full workflow is currently supported, but not automated by, Drupal VM.

[geerlingguy]

This is also something that I'm considering using as an excuse to switch things to my geerlingguy.drupal role instead of custom playbooks inside Drupal VM.

I noticed this drupal.org issue for direct Composer support that might be worth following:

https://www.drupal.org/node/2551607

[jasloe]

Good news, Jeff. Thanks for such a great resource. Slightly off-topic: wondering whether the addition of Drupal Console is also something worth exploring in the context of this project?

[geerlingguy]

@minorscience - Drupal Console has been part of Drupal VM for some time :) — just make sure it's uncommented in installed_extras.

[oxyc]

@geerlingguy but then it's only a documentation issue right? Would be cool to get the building blocks in for a 3.0.0 release as I assume switching to geerlingguy.drupal would require quite a few breaking changes. Docs for best practice could be added or tuned later in my opinion. I'd like to give composer a shot too as we've made the switch on all of our non-Drupal projects already :)

Edit: or are you considering using composer as the default instead of drush make?

[thom8]

👍 for geerlingguy.drupal - would be good to collaborate if possible.

We're looking to push this role to galaxy when stable, which currently supports composer installations.

[geerlingguy]

I'm considering composer as the default, and drush make as an alternative option. It's definitely going to be the future of Drupal 8 site building, and the main/only reason to keep it around is for D7 projects, imo.

[frob]

+1 to this. Just started finding drupal projects that drush cannot install correctly.

[heddn]

https://github.com/MTechLLC/d8_starter is composer driven base d8 starter site that has ideas to consider.