The present and future of configuration management

The Configuration Management is one of the signature improvements of Drupal 8.

However, now that the community has a couple of years of building Drupal 8 sites behind them, various limitations have surfaced: various common workflows are not natively supported; core's config APIs have missing functionality. While many of these problems have contrib workarounds, often these solutions can conflict with one another, and there's no one set of best practices that works for all.

Hence the Configuration Management Initiative 2.0.

The key aspects are:

• Installing sites from config: Config Installer in core (8.6)
• Replacing Config Filter: The new ConfigTransform service (8.7)
• Environment-specific configuration: Config Split in core (8.7?)
• Updating config without overriding customizations (modules and distros)
• Documentation for both workflows to use it and API to develop with (“best practices”)

This session will give you an overview on the progress of CMI 2.0 and our roadmap. And in addition, show you how you can structure your projects and workflows with contrib solutions that exist today to minimize disruption. We will introduce the future best practices based on the contrib experience and give you practical examples for real world challenges.

Participants will need to have experience with basic configuration management workflows in Drupal 8 and will walk away with a better understanding of how the limitations can be addressed and how they can help make it happen.