Today I got my feed wet with Drupal 8 Configuration Management. For those who are new to this excellent feature in Drupal 8, you should read the documentation at drupal.org (Managing configuration in Drupal 8) or watch this DrupalCon Amsterdam video. This article assumes you are familiar with Drush and Drush aliases.

I worked with a very basic workflow using a development site and an acceptance site. Both sites are under revision control, where the complete webroot (core + modules, but not settings.php) is placed in git. For gitignore I used a copy of the example.gitignore which you'll find in Drupal's root directory.

I used Drush 7 to import and export the configuration. 'Export' is to transfer a site's configuration from Drupal to file and 'Import' is to transfer in reversed direction. Using drush @dev config-export you export the configuration from the development site to the sites/default/config_*/staging directory. The staging directory now holds many *.yml files that each contain the configuration of an individual section. I've chosen to use git to transfer these files to the acceptance site. At the acceptance site drush @acc config-import is used to transfer the configuration from the file system to the acceptance site.

Make sure that the acceptance site is a copy of the development site. For example using drush @dev archive-dump you can make a copy of both the files and database. With this you can create a copy of the site using drush archive-restore.

I made these changes to the .gitignore file to allow the staging directory to be added to git: