Composer template for Drupal projects

This project template should provide a kickstart for managing your site dependencies with Composer.

If you want to know, how to use it as replacement for Drush Make visit the Documentation on drupal.org.

Usage

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.

After that you can create the project:

composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:7.x-dev some-dir --stability dev --no-interaction

With composer require ... you can download new dependencies to your installation.

cd some-dir
composer require "drupal/ctools:~1.12"

What does the template do?

When installing the given composer.json some tasks are taken care of:

Drupal will be installed in the web-directory.
Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/sites/all/modules/contrib/
Theme (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/sites/all/themes/contrib/
Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/
Libraries (packages of type drupal-library) will be placed in web/sites/all/libraries/ (See Libraries)
Helps for using othe PHP packages almost similar to the Drupal 8 version

How to enable the Composer autoloader in your Drupal 7 website

The skeleton already installs the composer_autoloader module. Just enable it in the website before enabling any possible module that have dependencies various packages.

Adding patches to core, contrib modules or themes

You may add a patch so you don't need to maintain separate a modified module or theme to get faster a fix or make a critical change for your project. Add in composer.json as in the example.

"extra": {
  "patches": {
    "drupal/drupal": {
      "Add startup configuration for PHP server": "https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/add_a_startup-1543858-30.patch"
    }
  }
}

Libraries

Libraries normally would be extra packages that need to be public available (CSS and JS). Normally this are not maintained using Composer, but if you want to have a 100% Composer deployment and benefit from patches you can use in composer.json this example, changing the repositories section and adding in require section:


"repositories": {
  ...
  "slick": {
    "type": "package",
    "package": {
        "name": "kenwheeler/slick",
        "version": "1.6.0",
        "dist": {
            "url": "https://github.com/kenwheeler/slick/archive/1.6.0.zip",
            "type": "zip"
        },
        "source": {
            "url": "https://github.com/kenwheeler/slick.git",
            "type": "git",
            "reference": "1.6.0"
        },
        "type": "drupal-library"
    }
  }
},
"require": {
  ...
  "kenwheeler/slick": "~1.6.0"
},

After this run composer update --lock to install just the manually managed package. (You may run composer require "kenwheeler/slick:~1.6.0" as well if you add just the package definition)

FAQ

Should I commit the contrib modules I download

Composer recommends no. They provide argumentation against but also workrounds if a project decides to do it anyway.

renaatdemuynck/drupal-project