Unbeknown to many users, installation profiles are what is used to install a Drupal site. The two profiles that ship with core are standard and minimal. Standard gives new users a basic, functional Drupal site. Minimal provides a very minimal configuration so developers and site builders can start building a new site. A key piece of a Drupal distro is an installation profile.

I beleive that developers and more experienced site builders should be using installation profiles as part of their client sites builds. In Drupal 7 an installation profile is treated like a special module, so it can implement hooks - including hook_update_N(). This means that the installation profile is the best place for controlling turning modules on and off, switching themes or any other site wide configuration changes that can't be handled by features or a module specific update hook.

In an ideal world you could have 1 installation profile that is used for all of your projects and you just include it in your base build. Unfortunately installation profiles tend to evolve into being very project specific. At the same time you are likely to want a common starting point. I like to give my installation profiles unique names, rather than something generic like "my_profile", I prefer to use "[client_prefix]_profile". I'll cover project prefixes in another blog post.

After some trial and error, I've settled on a solution which I think works for having a common starting point for an installation profile that will diverge overtime using a unique namespace. My solution relies on some basic templates, a bash script with a bit of sed. I could have written all of this in PHP and even made a drush plugin for it, but I prefer to do this kind of thing on the command line with bash. I'm happy to work with someone to port it to a drush plugin if you're interested.

Here is a simple example of the templates you could use for creating your installation profile. The version on github is closer to what I actually use for clients, along with the build script.

base.info

name = PROFILE_NAMEdescription = PROFILE_DESCRIPTIONcore = 7.xdependencies[] = blockdependencies[] = dblog
base.install

<?php/** * @file * Install, update and uninstall functions for the the PROFILE_NAME install profile. *//** * Implements hook_install(). * * Performs actions to set up the site for this profile. * * @see system_install() */function PROFILE_NAMESPACE_install() {  // Enable some standard blocks.  $default_theme = variable_get('theme_default', 'bartik');  $values = array(    array(      'module' => 'system',      'delta' => 'main',      'theme' => $default_theme,      'status' => 1,      'weight' => 0,      'region' => 'content',      'pages' => '',      'cache' => -1,    ),    array(      'module' => 'user',      'delta' => 'login',      'theme' => $default_theme,      'status' => 1,      'weight' => 0,      'region' => 'sidebar_first',      'pages' => '',      'cache' => -1,    ),    array(      'module' => 'system',      'delta' => 'navigation',      'theme' => $default_theme,      'status' => 1,      'weight' => 0,      'region' => 'sidebar_first',      'pages' => '',      'cache' => -1,    ),    array(      'module' => 'system',      'delta' => 'management',      'theme' => $default_theme,      'status' => 1,      'weight' => 1,      'region' => 'sidebar_first',      'pages' => '',      'cache' => -1,    ),    array(      'module' => 'system',      'delta' => 'help',      'theme' => $default_theme,      'status' => 1,      'weight' => 0,      'region' => 'help',      'pages' => '',      'cache' => -1,    ),  );  $query = db_insert('block')->fields(array('module', 'delta', 'theme', 'status', 'weight', 'region', 'pages', 'cache'));  foreach ($values as $record) {    $query->values($record);  }  $query->execute();  // Allow visitor account creation, but with administrative approval.  variable_set('user_register', USER_REGISTER_VISITORS_ADMINISTRATIVE_APPROVAL);  // Enable default permissions for system roles.  user_role_grant_permissions(DRUPAL_ANONYMOUS_RID, array('access content'));  user_role_grant_permissions(DRUPAL_AUTHENTICATED_RID, array('access content'));}// Add hook_update_N() implementations below here as needed.
base.profile

<?php/** * @file * Enables modules and site configuration for a PROFILE_NAME site installation. *//** * Implements hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() for install_configure_form(). * * Allows the profile to alter the site configuration form. */function PROFILE_NAMESPACE_form_install_configure_form_alter(&$form, $form_state) {  // Pre-populate the site name with the server name.  $form['site_information']['site_name']['#default_value'] = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];}

Some developers might recognise the code above, it is from the minial installation profile.

The installation profile builder script is a simple bash script that relies on sed.

build-profile.sh

#!/bin/bash## Installation profile builder# Created by Dave Hall <a href="http://davehall.com.au/" title="http://davehall.com.au" rel="nofollow">http://davehall.com.au</a>#FILES="base.info base.install base.profile"OK_NS_CHARS="a-z0-9_"SCRIPT_NAME=$(basename $0)namespace="my_profile"name=""description="My automatically generated installation profile."target=""usage() {  echo "usage: $SCRIPT_NAME -t target_path -s profile_namespace [-d 'project_descrption'] [-n 'human_readable_profile_name']"}while getopts  "d:n:s:t:h" arg; do  case $arg in    d)      description="$OPTARG"      ;;    n)      name="$OPTARG"      ;;    s)      namespace="$OPTARG"      ;;    t)      target="$OPTARG"      ;;    h)      usage      exit      ;;  esacdoneif [ -z "$target" ]; then  echo ERROR: You must specify a target path. &gt;&amp;2  exit 1;fiif [ ! -d "$target" -o ! -w "$target" ]; then  echo ERROR: The target path must be a writable directory that already exists. &gt;&amp;2  exit 1;fins_test=${namespace/[^$OK_NS_CHARS]//}if [ "$ns_test" != "$namespace" ]; then  echo "ERROR: The namespace can only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters and underscores ($OK_NS_CHARS)" &gt;&amp;2  exit 1fiif [ -z "$name" ]; then  name="$namespace";fifor file in $FILES; do  echo Processing $file  sed -e "s/PROFILE_NAMESPACE/$namespace/g" -e "s/PROFILE_NAME/$name/g" -e "s/PROFILE_DESCRIPTION/$description/g" $file &gt; $target/$filedoneecho Completed generating files for $name installation profile in $target.

Place all of the above files into a directory. Before you can generate your first profile you must run "chmod +x build-profile.sh" to make the script executable.

You need to create the output directory, for testing we will use ~/test-profile, so run "mkdir ~/test-profile" to create the path. To build your profile run "./build-profile.sh -s test -t ~/test-profile". Once the script has run you should have a test installation profile in ~/test-profile.

I will continue to maintain this as a project on github.