Chapter 9. Useful Tools and Getting Help

When dealing with Configuration Management, you might get to a point where you need help. This chapter provides a list of useful links and tools provided by the Drupal community.

Your starting point should be the documentation pages on Drupal.org. These pages are maintained by members of the Drupal community, and anyone with a Drupal.org user account can add or change them.

Community documentation

The Drupal.org community documentation contains a section on Configuration Management for developers: Configuration API in Drupal 8, which can be found at https://drupal.org/developing/api/8/configuration.

This section contains several subpages with in-depth information, and is a must-read for developers who work with the Configuration Management API.

The administration guide documentation

The Drupal.org administration guide provides information about the daily or ongoing operation of a Drupal site. Configuration Management is documented in general terms in the Managing configuration in Drupal 8 post at https://drupal.org/documentation/administer/config.

Contributed modules

There are a couple of contributed modules which help you developing configuration.

The configuration inspector for Drupal 8

The configuration inspector uses Drupal 8's core built-in configuration system as well as a schema system to let you inspect configuration values and the use of schemas on top of them. This makes it possible to have a developer-focused overview of all your configuration values, and perform various testing and verification tasks on your configuration schemas. The following is a screenshot taken from https://drupal.org/project/config_inspector this module lists the available configuration data for user.settings:

Configuration development

This module helps in developing configuration. It does the following three things:

• Importing configuration files automatically into active storage

• Exporting configuration objects automatically into files

• Helping to create modules that behave somewhat similarly to feature exporting in Drupal 7

Check the module's project page at https://www.drupal.org/project/config_devel for more details.

Drush

Drush is a command-line shell and scripting interface that makes life easier for people who develop websites with Drupal. If you don't know Drush yet, go visit its GitHub page at https://github.com/drush-ops/drush.

The tool provides some useful commands for Configuration Management.

Exporting and importing your configuration using Drush commands

The following Drush commands will be the most used ones as they allow you to export and import your configuration with a simple command:

• drush config-export staging: This will export the configuration from the active directory

• drush config-import staging: This will import the configuration from a config directory named staging

There are other commands available. We will only list the commands here. Read Drush's help documentation to find out how to use these commands, since they may have specific arguments and options. The commands are listed as follows:

• config-get: This will display a config value or a whole configuration object.

• config-set:...

Forums

For support questions, you can visit the forum at https://drupal.org/forum. Make sure you do a search first because there is a very good chance that your specific question has already been answered.

The issue queue

The issue queue is where all discussions happen. It contains a vast history of the configuration system so, if you want to dig deeper, this is the place to go. You get to this issue queue by visiting Drupal's project page at http://drupal.org/project/drupal, and clicking through to the issues linked in the right sidebar. You should then filter by Version (8.x issues) and Component (a configuration system or configuration entity system). Here's a direct link to the configuration system queue: https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?version=8.x&component=configuration+system.

The direct link to the configuration entity system's issue queue is https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?version=8.x&component=configuration+entity+system.

Tip

The issue queue is also the place to provide patches, but you shouldn't ask for support there.

IRC chat

The Drupal community uses IRC to chat about different topics. To find out more about IRC, visit https://drupal.org/irc. The IRC channel for Configuration Management is #drupal-cmi.

Summary

Now you know some tools and how to get help, along with everything there is to know about Drupal 8's Configuration Management. Make sure you use it in your next project! Don't forget, it's important to be able to track configuration changes to your site, as it will save you time in the long run.

Do you have any questions or corrections?

Questions

You can contact us at http://drupal-8-configuration-management.undpaul.com if you are facing a problem with any aspect of this book, and we will do our best to address it.