README

This package takes over the settings.php file for Drupal using scaffolding from drupal/core-composer-scaffold and allows it to manage Drupal settings from composer packages with the type drupal-settings in the vendor directory.

Install

composer require upstreamable/drupal-settings-installer

The package automatically adds itself to the allowed packages list for drupal/core-composer-scaffold. After that upstreamable/drupal-settings-db-env can be required to manage the database credentials using environment variables or upstreamable/drupal-settings-db-sqlite-private if just sqlite is needed.

Why?

Composer project templates are great, except they are a "fork and forget" model. This means various project files can drift and lose updates when there are upstream improvements. The initial settings.php file installed with a project template or a site install is a monolyth that doesn't support environment variables and mixes site settings, database credentials and configuration overrides.

This package aims to solve that problem by allowing small chunks of settings to be included by requiring a composer package.

For example if you have some development-only settings you can add those settings to the require-dev section of your root composer.json.

How does it work?

The settings.php included searches for composer packages with the type drupal-settings among the composer packages installed. Each package has a weight determined by the patch number in its version. For example a package with a 1.0.20 version will a have weight of 20. Heavier settings will be aplied later and therefore overwrite defaults set by this plugin or lighter settings. See upstreamable/drupal-settings-db-env as an example.

This also implies that the patch version number will not have the usual meaning in the package and only the major and minor numbers will be increased.

Defaults

The plugin sets some defaults that can be seen in the assets/default.settings.php file. Those can be overridden by having a settings file that modifies their value or, in some cases, with an environment variable like DRUPAL_HASH_SALT.

Custom settings

Although some code can be appended to the scaffolded setting.php it is better to create a local composer package so all the settings are in the vendor folder.. A packages directory needs to be created and added as a repository to the root composer.json, for example:

    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "composer",
            "url": "https://packages.drupal.org/8"
        },
        {
            "type": "path",
            "url": "packages/*"
        }
    ],

Then create a packages/custom-settings with a minimal composer.json file like this:


{
    "name": "upstreamable/custom-settings",
    "version": "1.0.99",
    "type": "drupal-settings",
}

Note the 99 in the patch version number to get a high weight that will override settings from lighter packages. At the same level create a settings.php with custom settings, for example:

<?php
$settings['config_sync_directory'] = '../config/sync';

This overrides the default settings of using ../config as a sync directory.

Finally run composer require upstreamable/custom-settings and the new value should take effect.

More packages with drupal settings

Packages published in packagist.org

Development packages

Development configurations

Credits

It was inspired by bluehorndigital/mojo-drupal-scaffold which provides files to setup a Drupal project. The Drupal settings installer only takes care of the settings.php system and doesn't decide how environment variables should be provided (as system variables in a docker container or through a .env file to name two examples). The mojo drupal scaffold project also provides configuration for contrib modules such as redis or flysystem but with this plugin those can be separated into their own projects.

upstreamable / drupal-settings-installer

Maintainers

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