Composer template for Drupal projects

This project template provides a starter kit for managing your site dependencies with Composer.

What does the template do?

• Drupal will be installed in the web directory.
• Generated composer autoloader vendor/autoload.php is used instead of web/vendor/autoload.php provided by Drupal core.
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/modules/contrib directory.
• Themes (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in web/themes/contrib directory.
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/contrib directory.
• Creates default writable versions of settings.php and services.yml.
• Creates web/sites/default/files directory.
• Drush is installed for use as vendor/bin/drush.
• Provides an example of the .env file.

Installing

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.

Create your project:

composer create-project ramsalt/drupal-project:11.x-dev some-dir --no-interaction

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.

Usage

Adding new dependencies

Use composer require to include and download dependencies for your project.

cd some-dir
composer require drupal/devel

By default, this project is set to install only stable releases of dependencies, as specified by "minimum-stability": "stable" in composer.json. If you need to use non-stable releases (e.g., alpha, beta, RC), you can modify the version constraint to allow for such versions. For instance, to require a beta version of a module:

composer require drupal/devel:1.0.0-beta1

Alternatively, you can globally adjust the stability settings by modifying composer.json to include the desired stability level and explicitly allow it:

{
    "minimum-stability": "beta",
    "prefer-stable": true
}

This configuration ensures that stable releases are preferred, but allows the installation of non-stable packages when necessary.

Adding libraries

You can manage front-end asset libraries with Composer thanks to the asset-packagist repository. Composer will detect and install new versions of a library that meet the stated constraints.

composer require bower-asset/dropzone

Custom installation paths for libraries

The installation path of a specific library can be controlled by adding it to the extra.installer-paths configuration preceding web/libraries/{$name}. For example, the chosen Drupal module expects the chosen library to be located on web/libraries/chosen, but composer require npm-asset/chosen-js installs the library into web/libraries/chosen-js. The following configuration overrides installation it into the expected directory:

{
    "extra": {
        "installer-paths": {
            "web/libraries/chosen": [
                "npm-asset/chosen-js"
            ],
            "web/libraries/{$name}": [
                "type:drupal-library",
                "type:npm-asset",
                "type:bower-asset"
            ]
        }
    }
}

For more details, see https://asset-packagist.org/site/about

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 Drupal 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.

FAQs

Should I commit the contrib modules I download?

Composer recommends no. They provide argumentation against but also workarounds 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 etc.) 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 included dependencies?

If you need to apply patches, you can do so with the composer-patches plugin included in this project.

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?

There are 2 places where Composer will be looking for PHP version requirements when resolving dependencies:

1. The require.php version value in composer.json.
2. The config.platform version value in composer.json.

The purpose of require.php is to set the minimum PHP language requirements for a package. For example, the minimum version required for Drupal 11.0 is 8.3 or above, which can be specified as >=8.3.

The purpose of config.platform is to set the PHP language requirements for the specific instance of the package running in the current environment. For example, while the minimum version required for Drupal 11 is 8.3 or above, the actual PHP version on the hosting provider could be 8.3.1. The value of this field should provide your exact version of PHP with all 3 parts of the version.

Which versions to specify in my Drupal site?

This project includes drupal/core which already has require.php added. Your would inherit that constraint. There is no need to add require.php to your composer.json.

config.platform is a platform-specific. It is recommended to specify config.platform as a specific version (e.g.8.3.1) constraint to ensure that only the package versions supported by your current environment are used.

"config": {
    "platform": {
        "php": "8.3.1"
    }
},