Composer template for Drupal projects

This project template provides a starter kit for managing your site dependencies with Composer.

This is a fork of drupal-composer/drupal-project which is set up with support for Continuous Integration out of the box.

Additional features

This fork has the following additions to the original version of drupal-project:

• Customizable builds: Different builds for production and development environments are created with Phing. These can be fully customized using a set of configuration files.
• Behat support: Behat is included so you can easily test user scenarios.
• Preconfigured test suites: PHPUnit is fully set up for running unit tests as well as kernel tests, web tests and javascript tests.
• PHP CodeSniffer: Check compliance with coding standards with a single command, or set it up to scan automatically whenever you git push.
• Travis CI: Integrates seamlessly with Travis CI so you can automate your tests right from the start. No setup needed!

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:

git clone https://github.com/pfrenssen/drupal-project.git some-dir
cd some-dir
composer install

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

composer require drupal/devel:~1.0

The composer create-project command passes ownership of all files to the project that is created. You should create a new git repository, and commit all files not excluded by the .gitignore file.

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.
• Autoloader is implemented to use the generated composer autoloader in vendor/autoload.php, instead of the one provided by Drupal (web/vendor/autoload.php).
• Modules (packages of type drupal-module) will be placed in web/modules/contrib/
• Theme (packages of type drupal-theme) will be placed in web/themes/contrib/
• Profiles (packages of type drupal-profile) will be placed in web/profiles/contrib/
• Creates default writable versions of settings.php and services.yml.
• Creates web/sites/default/files-directory.
• Latest version of drush is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drush.
• Latest version of DrupalConsole is installed locally for use at vendor/bin/drupal.
• Creates environment variables based on your .env file. See .env.example.

Updating Drupal Core

This project will attempt to keep all of your Drupal Core files up-to-date; the project drupal-composer/drupal-scaffold is used to ensure that your scaffold files are updated every time drupal/core is updated. If you customize any of the "scaffolding" files (commonly .htaccess), you may need to merge conflicts if any of your modified files are updated in a new release of Drupal core.

Follow the steps below to update your core files.

1. Run composer update drupal/core webflo/drupal-core-require-dev "symfony/*" --with-dependencies to update Drupal Core and its dependencies.
2. Run git diff to determine if any of the scaffolding files have changed. Review the files for any changes and restore any customizations to .htaccess or robots.txt.
3. Commit everything all together in a single commit, so web will remain in sync with the core when checking out branches or running git bisect.
4. In the event that there are non-trivial conflicts in step 2, you may wish to perform these steps on a branch, and use git merge to combine the updated core files with your customized files. This facilitates the use of a three-way merge tool such as kdiff3. This setup is not necessary if your changes are simple; keeping all of your modifications at the beginning or end of the file is a good strategy to keep merges easy.

Generate composer.json from existing project

With using the "Composer Generate" drush extension you can now generate a basic composer.json file from an existing project. Note that the generated composer.json might differ from this project's file.

Customize build properties

Create a new file in the root of the project named build.properties.local using your favourite text editor:

$ vim build.properties.local

This file will contain configuration which is unique to your development machine. This is mainly useful for specifying your database credentials and the username and password of the Drupal admin user so they can be used during the installation.

Because these settings are personal they should not be shared with the rest of the team. Make sure you never commit this file!

All options you can use can be found in the build.properties.dist file. Just copy the lines you want to override and change their values. For example:

# Database settings.
drupal.db.name = my_database
drupal.db.user = root
drupal.db.password = hunter2

# Admin user.
drupal.admin.username = admin
drupal.admin.password = admin

# The base URL to use in tests.
drupal.base_url = http://myproject.local

# Verbosity of Drush commands. Set to 'yes' for verbose output.
drush.verbose = yes

Listing the available build commands

You can get a list of all the available Phing build commands ("targets") with a short description of each target with the following command:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing

Install the website.

$ ./vendor/bin/phing install

Set up tools for the development environment

If you want to install a version suitable for development you can execute the setup-dev Phing target.

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-dev

This will perform the following tasks:

1. Configure Behat.
2. Configure PHP CodeSniffer.
3. Enable 'development mode'. This will:

• Enable the services in development.services.yml.
• Show all error messages with backtrace information.
• Disable CSS and JS aggregation.
• Disable the render cache.
• Allow test modules and themes to be installed.
• Enable access to rebuild.php.

4. Enable development modules.
5. Create a demo user for each user role.

To set up a development environment quickly, you can perform both the install and setup-dev targets at once by executing install-dev:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing install-dev

Running Behat tests

The Behat test suite is located in the tests/ folder. The easiest way to run them is by going into this folder and executing the following command:

$ cd tests/
$ ./behat

If you want to execute a single test, just provide the path to the test as an argument. The tests are located in tests/features/:

$ cd tests/
$ ./behat features/authentication.feature

If you want to run the tests from a different folder, then provide the path to tests/behat.yml with the -c option:

# Run the tests from the root folder of the project.
$ ./vendor/bin/behat -c tests/behat.yml

Testing JavaScript functionality

For testing functionality written in JavaScript you can use software such as Selenium and PhantomJS to run Behat tests in a real browser.

To enable JavaScript testing for a Behat scenario, add the @javascript tag to the test, and make sure the WebDriver of your choice is running in the background.

Chrome

Set the following build property in your build.properties file:

# The browser to use for testing, either 'firefox' or 'chrome'.
behat.browser_name = chrome

Make sure to regenerate your Behat configuration file after making this change:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-behat

You can install Selenium and Chrome / Chromium locally on your system and start Selenium with java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar.

However the simplest way of running Chrome on Selenium is using a container. You can use Docker to install and run it with a single command. This will download all necessary files and start it in the background in headless mode:

$ docker run -d -p 4444:4444 --network=host selenium/standalone-chrome

If you want to look at the browser running, you can run the 'debug' version and use a VNC client such as TigerVNC to connect to the browser (the password is 'secret'):

$ docker run -d -p 4444:4444 -p 5900:5900 --network=host selenium/standalone-chrome-debug

For more information on running a containerized Selenium, see SeleniumHQ/docker-selenium.

Firefox

Set the following build property in your build.properties file:

# The browser to use for testing, either 'firefox' or 'chrome'.
behat.browser_name = firefox

Make sure to regenerate your Behat configuration file after making this change:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-behat

You can install Selenium and Firefox locally on your system and start Selenium with java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar.

However the simplest way of running Firefox on Selenium is using a container. You can use Docker to install and run it with a single command. This will download all necessary files and start it in the background in headless mode:

$ docker run -d -p 4444:4444 --network=host selenium/standalone-firefox:2.53.1

Note that the WebDriver implementation for Firefox (Marionette) is not yet complete for Selenium 3, so we are specifying the latest 2.x version. This will probably be ready soon, when Selenium 3 is out of beta.

If you want to look at the browser running, you can run the 'debug' version and use a VNC client such as TigerVNC to connect to the browser (the password is 'secret'):

$ docker run -d -p 4444:4444 -p 5900:5900 --network=host selenium/standalone-firefox-debug:2.53.1

For more information on running a containerized Selenium, see SeleniumHQ/docker-selenium.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless browser based on Webkit, which is the same engine which Chrome uses. You can install it from your package manager, or download it.

Declare that you are using a Chrome-alike browser in your build.properties file:

# The browser to use for testing, either 'firefox' or 'chrome'.
behat.browser_name = chrome

Make sure to regenerate your Behat configuration file after making this change:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-behat

Now you can run PhantomJS in WebDriver mode, and run your tests. All your tests marked with @javascript will now be executed using PhantomJS.

$ phantomjs --webdriver=4444

Running PHPUnit tests

Run the tests from the web folder:

$ cd web/
$ ../vendor/bin/phpunit

By default all tests in the folders web/modules/custom, web/profiles and web/themes/custom are included when running the tests. Check the section on PHPUnit in the build.properties.dist to customize the tests.

Checking for coding standards violations

Set up PHP CodeSniffer

PHP CodeSniffer is included to do coding standards checks of PHP and JS files. In the default configuration it will scan all files in the following folders:

• web/modules (excluding web/modules/contrib)
• web/profiles
• web/themes

First you'll need to execute the setup-php-codesniffer Phing target (note that this also runs as part of the install-dev and setup-dev targets):

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-php-codesniffer

This will generate a phpcs.xml file containing settings specific to your local environment. Make sure to never commit this file.

Run coding standards checks

Run checks manually

The coding standards checks can then be run as follows:

# Scan all files for coding standards violations.
$ ./vendor/bin/phpcs

# Scan only a single folder.
$ ./vendor/bin/phpcs web/modules/custom/mymodule

Run checks automatically when pushing

To save yourself the embarrassment of pushing non-compliant code to the git repository you can put the following line in your build.properties.local:

# Whether or not to run a coding standards check before doing a git push. Note
# that this will abort the push if the coding standards check fails.
phpcs.prepush.enable = 1

and then regenerate your PHP CodeSniffer configuration:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-php-codesniffer

If your project requires all team members to follow coding standards, put this line in the project configuration (build.properties) instead.

Note that this will not allow you to push any code that fails the coding standards check. If you really need to push in a hurry, then you can disable the coding standards check by executing this Phing target:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing disable-pre-push

The pre-push hook will be reinstated when the setup-php-codesniffer target is executed.

Customize configuration

The basic configuration can be changed by copying the relevant Phing properties from the "PHP CodeSniffer configuration" section in build.properties.dist to build.properties and changing them to your requirements. Then regenerate the phpcs.xml file by running the setup-php-codesniffer target:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing setup-php-codesniffer

To change to PHP CodeSniffer ruleset itself, make a copy of the file phpcs-ruleset.xml.dist and rename it to phpcs-ruleset.xml, and then put this line in your build.properties file:

phpcs.standard = ${project.basedir}/phpcs-ruleset.xml

For more information on configuring the ruleset see Annotated ruleset.

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.

Should I commit the scaffolding files?

The drupal-scaffold plugin can download the scaffold files (like index.php, update.php, …) to the web/ directory of your project. If you have not customized those files you could choose to not check them into your version control system (e.g. git). If that is the case for your project it might be convenient to automatically run the drupal-scaffold plugin after every install or update of your project. You can achieve that by registering @composer drupal:scaffold as post-install and post-update command in your composer.json:

"scripts": {
    "post-install-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ],
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "@composer drupal:scaffold",
        "..."
    ]
},

How can I apply patches to downloaded modules?

If you need to apply patches (depending on the project being modified, a pull request is often a better solution), you can do so with the composer-patches plugin.

To add a patch to drupal module foobar insert the patches section in the extra section of composer.json:

"extra": {
    "patches": {
        "drupal/foobar": {
            "Patch description": "URL or local path to patch"
        }
    }
}

How do I switch from packagist.drupal-composer.org to packages.drupal.org?

Follow the instructions in the documentation on drupal.org.

How do I specify a PHP version ?

This project supports PHP 5.6 as minimum version (see Drupal 8 PHP requirements), however it's possible that a composer update will upgrade some package that will then require PHP 7+.

To prevent this you can add this code to specify the PHP version you want to use in the config section of composer.json:

"config": {
    "sort-packages": true,
    "platform": {
        "php": "5.6.40"
    }
},