README.md

Automatic configuration export

TODO: Extract the Drupal module config_change_track from Subscriptions.

This project supports automatically exporting configuration from a Drupal site and creating a PR with the changes.

Goals

1. Don't remotely access the host: ideally we avoid adding a token with SSH access to the production environment to our CI. (And in many cases we only have a shared account with access to multiple sites, which makes it worse.)
2. Ensure the GitHub token deployed on the Drupal site can't push to the source repo: if it got exfiltrated it could be used to add code without review and make deployments.

Overview

1. Use an intermediate configuration (only) repo.
2. Give the Drupal site write access to the repo and have it regularly update a branch with the current config.
3. Give the Drupal site source repo read access to the config repo and have it regularly check for updates, creating a PR when found.

Setup

1. Create an intermediate repo that the Drupal site will push config to and the Drupal site repo will poll for changes. Eg.

   # Assuming the config repo URL is in $config_repo_url.
   # Run from the project root.
   config_dir=config/sync
   config_repo_dir="$(mktemp -d)"
   cp "$config_dir"/* "$config_repo_dir"
   pushd "$config_repo_dir"
   git init
   git remote add origin "$config_repo_url"
   git push origin HEAD
   popd
   rm -rf "$config_repo_dir" 

2. Create two access tokens for the config repo:
   1. A write token for the Drupal site to push config changes;
   2. A read token for the Drupal site repo to pull config changes.
3. Set up the host to push to the config repo:
   1. Add the required environment variables, see check-and-push-config.sh.
   2. Add Config Change Track to the codebase and enable. TODO: This needs extracting from Faith Subscriptions.
   3. Schedule check-and-push-config.sh to run regularly.
4. Set up the Drupal site repo to pull from the config repo:
   1. Check update-config-branch.yml for required permissions, secrets and variables to set up.
   2. Add update-config-branch.yml to the Drupal site repo's /.github directory. It's configured to check for changes every 30 minutes (though GitHub doesn't guarantee it will run that frequently). It will create a branch config-only that mirrors the main branch of the config repo and keep it up-to-date. When there are changes a PR is created against staging.

Action Usage

The action is responsible for keeping the site repo's config branch up-to-date with the config repo, and opening a PR when the latest config doesn't match what's in the site repo's staging branch.

uses: andriokha/update-config@main
with:
  # The GitHub config repo, eg. MyOrg/MySiteConfig.
  config_repo: ''
  
  # A token with read access to the config repository.
  config_repo_token: ''
  
  # The branch on the config repository.
  config_repo_branch: ''
  
  # The GitHub Drupal site repo, eg. MyOrg/MySite.
  # Default: ${{ github.repository }}
  site_repo: ''
  
  # The GitHub Drupal site repo token with access to write contents and create
  # PRs.
  # Default: ${{ github.token }}
  site_repo_token: ''
  
  # The branch on the site repository that mirrors the config repository.
  # Default: config-only
  site_repo_config_branch: ''

  # The name of the live branch (ie the one that's currently deployed).
  # Default: main
  site_repo_live_branch: ''
  
  # The name of the topic branch to create on the site repository with config
  # changes.
  # Default: automatic-config-export
  site_repo_pr_branch: ''
  
  # The branch on the site repository from which to create the PR branch.
  # Default: staging
  site_repo_pr_branch_base: ''
  
  # The name used on the git merge commit.
  # Default: R2D2
  committer_name: ''
  
  # The email used on the git merge commit.
  # Default: [email protected]
  committer_email: ''
  
  # A space-separated list of github users including '@' to ping on a new PR,
  # eg. '@alice @bob'.
  # Default: ''
  github_notify: ''