An introduction to Configuration Management

The general definition of the term "Configuration Management" is somewhat different from the definition of Configuration Management in Drupal 8. To make things easier, we will focus on explaining what Configuration Management is in Drupal terms.

Configuration Management in Drupal 8 aims at making configuration manageable across different environments by allowing us to store configuration in files instead of the database.

Let's start by defining what configuration is, and what other types of information exist in Drupal 8.

Configuration

Configuration is the information about your site that is not content and is meant to be more permanent, such as the name of your site, the content types, fields, and views you have defined.

Content

Content is the information meant to be displayed on your site, such as articles, basic pages, images, files, and so on.

Session

This is the information about an individual user's interactions with the site, such as whether they are logged in.

State

This is information of a temporary nature about the current state of your site. Examples include the time when Cron was last run, whether node access permissions need rebuilding, and so on.