Composer template for Drupal projects

This project template should provide a kickstart for managing your site dependencies with Composer.

If you want to know, how to use it as replacement for Drush Make visit the Documentation on drupal.org.

Usage

First you need to install composer.

Note: The instructions below refer to the global composer installation. You might need to replace composer with php composer.phar (or similar) for your setup.

After that you can create the project:

composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:7.x-dev some-dir --stability dev --no-interaction

With composer require ... you can download new dependencies to your installation.

cd some-dir
composer require "drupal/ctools:~1.12"

What does the template do?

When installing the given composer.json some tasks are taken care of:

• Drupal will be installed in the web-directory.
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/sites/all/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/sites/all/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/
• Libraries (packages of type drupal-library) will be placed in web/sites/all/libraries/ (See Libraries)

Adding patches to core, contrib modules or themes

You may add a patch so you don't need to maintain separate a modified module or theme to get faster a fix or make a critical change for your project. Add in composer.json as in the example.

"extra": {
  "patches": {
    "drupal/drupal": {
      "Add startup configuration for PHP server": "https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/add_a_startup-1543858-30.patch"
    }
  }
}

Libraries

Libraries normally would be extra packages that need to be public available (CSS and JS). Normally this are not maintained using Composer, but if you want to have a 100% Composer deployment and benefit from patches you can use in composer.json this example, changing the repositories section and adding in require section:

"repositories": {
  ...
  "slick": {
    "type": "package",
    "package": {
        "name": "kenwheeler/slick",
        "version": "1.6.0",
        "dist": {
            "url": "https://github.com/kenwheeler/slick/archive/1.6.0.zip",
            "type": "zip"
        },
        "source": {
            "url": "https://github.com/kenwheeler/slick.git",
            "type": "git",
            "reference": "1.6.0"
        },
        "type": "drupal-library"
    }
  }
},
"require": {
  ...
  "kenwheeler/slick": "~1.6.0"
},

After this run composer update --lock to install just the manually managed package. (You may run composer require "kenwheeler/slick:~1.6.0" as well if you add just the package definition)

FAQ

Should I commit the contrib modules I download

Composer recommends no. They provide argumentation against but also workrounds if a project decides to do it anyway.