Article

Large website projects involving multiple people in different roles face special challenges. The work needs to be coordinated and scheduled in such a way as to allow for parallel development of different parts of the project on different systems. As a consequence, sooner or later the different parts of the whole must be brought back together and integrated into the project’s main development trunk. Often, this process happens seamlessly; at other times, overlapping changes must be integrated manually.

In a Drupal 8 project, the Configuration Management module allows the website configuration files to be stored in a Git repository alongside the project code. As an added bonus, Git also provides features that facilitate distributed development, allowing work to be done on branches and merged together as required. When there are conflicts, external tools are available to visually present the conflicts to the user, making it easier to determine what happened in each instance.

Recently, the Drush project introduced a new command, config-merge, that streamlines the tasks needed to manage the configuration workflow steps to fetch and merge changes from a remote Drupal site.