Setup Configuration Management for Drupal 8 or 9 in 30 minutes

Introduction

Configuration management in drupal 8 provides a solution to a common problem when working with a website across multiple environments. Regardless of workflow at some point the configuration needs to move from one place to another, that is from local environment to production environment. When you pushing the development or local to production you need to have some common repository to export or import configuration entities via YAML format.

Below listed are considered configuration:

• Content Types
• Block Types
• Everything under Admin -> Configuration
• Everything under Admin -> Appearance,
• Views

Below listed are considered content and are not touched by this system:

• Nodes
• Custom blocks added on admin/structure/block/block-content
• Users
• Content for other entities

Lets setup drupal 8 for configuration

Navigate to the project root

Create new config and sync directories in the project root

mkdir config

cd config && mkdir sync

Update settings.php

Go to default directory

cd docroot/sites/default

sudo nano settings.php

Add the following line in the settings.php

$config_directories['config_sync_directory'] = '../config/sync';

Export Your Active Configuration

Importing configuration

Step 1 :- From your another site go to Configuration page and then open Configuration synchronization tab.

Step 2:- Upload a full site configuration archive to the mention directory in settings.php. Then it can be compared and imported on the Synchronize page.

Step 3 :- Finally click import all to import all the configuration from the Folder and then clear the caches and your work is done!!!

Using Drush (Recommended)

Step 1:- go to terminal

Step 2:- go to project directory docroot

Step 3:- Pull the code from github

drush cim -y

Configuration Ignore

Configuration Ignore is a straightforward contributed module that does what its name suggests - it ignores configuration on import. You can look at the project page at https://www.drupal.org/project/config_ignore. The key to leveraging the power of this module using the correct configuration entities to ignore. The module adds a form at /admin/config/development/configuration/ignore where you input a list of configuration names to ignore. It supports patterns, so you can exclude large chunks of configuration easily. We need to not overwrite/delete configuration which represents content components on the site. Most of these components are blocks, so I’m looking to exclude the blocks built as content, but not the structure (fields, display settings, etc.) of the blocks themselves. The entries you put in this form follow the file names of yml files in your site’s config export directory. Looking at the config directory for the site, I can see that these content blocks are in files which start with ‘block.block’. Also, as new landing pages are created using the Page Manager, we want to make sure that these aren’t touched on configuration import. These start with “page_manager.page” and “page_manager.page_variant.”