This is a SiteFarm Composer-based Drupal distribution template.

Get Started

You will need the following installed:

• Composer, obviously

When you have that, run this command:

$ composer install

Composer will download and install the SiteFarm install profile. You can then install it like you would any other Drupal site.

Updating Drupal Core

This project will attempt to keep all of your Drupal Core files up-to-date; the project drupal-composer/drupal-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 modfied files are updated in a new release of Drupal core.

Follow the steps below to update your 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 docroot 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.

Maintenance

Let this handy table be your guide to updating with Compser:

Task	Composer
Installing a contrib project (latest version)	composer require drupal/PROJECT:8.*
Installing a contrib project (specific version)	composer require drupal/PROJECT:8.1.0-beta3
Updating all contrib projects and Drupal core	composer update
Updating a single contrib project	composer update drupal/PROJECT
Updating Drupal core	composer update drupal/core

The magic is that Composer, unlike Drush, is a dependency manager. If module foo-8.x-1.0 depends on baz-8.x-3.2, Composer will not let you update baz to 8.x-3.3 (or downgrade it to 8.x-3.1, for that matter). Drush has no concept of dependency management. If you've ever accidentally hosed a site because of dependency issues like this, you've probably already realized how valuable Composer can be.

you still need Drush or Drupal Console. Tasks such as database updates (drush updatedb) are still firmly in Drush's province.

Composer is only responsible for maintaining the code base.

Source Control

If you peek at the .gitignore we provide, you'll see that certain directories, including all directories containing contributed projects, are excluded from source control. This might be a bit disconcerting if you're newly arrived from Planet Drush, but in a Composer-based project like this one, you SHOULD NOT commit your installed dependencies to source control.

Composer creates a file called composer.lock, which is a list of which dependencies were installed, and in which versions. Commit composer.lock to source control! Then, when your colleagues want to spin up their own copies of the project, all they'll have to do is run composer install, which will install the correct versions of everything in composer.lock.