Default to Composer-based site building instead of Drush Make #699
Description
Background:
- Use of Composer (instead of Drush Make) for building Drupal site #506 and PR Issue #506: Add support for composer based site builds #694
- http://docs.drupalvm.com/en/latest/deployment/composer/
Drupal VM currently supports building codebases using Composer or Drush make files. We were going to default to building with drupal-project and/or a composer.json file instead of the example drush.make.yml file, but some performance testing showed abysmal regressions in terms of the initial site build—and even fully cached site builds using Composer were 2x or more slower than Drush make file builds.
I'd like to move to using Composer as the default, as that's kind of where the puck is going... but before that can happen, we need to continue poking and prodding at Composer and all the default setup to make sure the Composer install is not a horrendously slow user experience, especially the first time (uncached).
@oxyc did some awesome investigative work and found that there are a few things we can do out of the gates to speed things up, like:
- Configure
vagrant-cachiercorrectly to cache everything from Composer outside the VM so it persists across builds. - Include
prestissimoto speed upcomposercommands by parallelizing downloads - Use
--prefer-dist
But I'm hoping there are some other optimizations we can make to get the composer installation time down quite a bit. I know @thom8 suggested composer/composer#4961 might help by using shallow Git clones, but we definitely need hard data (benchmarks) to back up theories.