Example Lesson - Composer Workflows for Drupal

Lesson Notes
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Transcript

Lesson Notes

This is an example lesson from our Composer Workflows for Drupal 8 course.

See Course Syllabus and Schedule

Frequently Asked Questions

Do the lesson videos play on iPads and iPhones?

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How can I ask questions or get help?

You can ask questions about the lesson or get help with your assignment by posting to the class discussion forums and attending the weekly live Q&A webinars with the instructor.

Do I need to have my own website or hosting account to work on?

No, we will provide you with a local development environment and a hosting account to work with for the duration of the class. This way you can follow along with the videos without messing up your existing website. Working with our development environment and hosting system also ensures your experience matches what you see in the lessons and allows us to troubleshoot any hosting-related issues you may have.

Playlist

Transcript

In this video I'm going to show you how to install Drupal modules and themes with composer. We already have a Drupal site set up in our development stack from a previous video. But now in this video, let's say that we want to add the path auto module to the site. Path auto is the module that allows you to automatically create user friendly and SEO friendly URLs or your Drupal content based on patterns that you configure. I'm not going to go into the details about how to use path auto because this is a video about composer but path auto is a good example module for us to us because it has some other modules that it requires. It has module dependencies, those are token in C tools, modules, and composer can handle figuring out these dependencies and downloading them for us automatically. So let me show you how that works. I'm going to go back over to my development environment, it's already started up. So I'll just login with vagrant SSH. And then I'll need to switch to the root level of my project. Now this is really important composure commands need to be run at the root level of the project. At this point, you will see there is a composer, that JSON file in this at this point at this level, and composer is going to use that file and it's going to update that file. As we make changes actually both composer Jason and composer lock it's going to be making changes to those files. And so it's important that this command be run at this level so that the correct files are being updated. If you go deeper into the Drupal folders here, there are other composer JSON files that are used for building the Drupal project itself and you don't want you don't want composer to get confused and start trying to update those it won't work properly. So please make sure that you always run the composer commands at the root level of your project. Alright, so in order to install path auto, the command that we want to use is composer require. So composer require tells composer that we want to add a new dependency to this project. All Drupal projects are all projects that can be found on drupal.org. So that's modules and themes that are honorable dot org can be found with composer using Drupal slash the short name of the project. The short name is the slug that shows up in the URL. So for path auto, this is just path auto all lowercase no spaces. So if we type composer require Drupal slash path auto, that will tell composer that we want to add the path auto module as a dependency for our project. When we hit enter, this will take a little time well composers doing right now is it's downloading the metadata for this path auto project. And in that metadata, it will find out what other dependencies path auto has, it will compute a dependency tree so Actually, you can see now on the screen that it found that it needed to download token and see tools as well. So it did that, but this will work recursively. So if it if it happened, that token also required another module, then all of those would have been downloaded it recursively goes through finds all of the dependencies that are required, and then checks which ones you may already have figures out exactly what to download and downloads it. Okay, now that the composer is download the files if we want to check, we can actually, it puts these modules in the web modules contrib folder. So if I just list the files in there, you'll see that it has three folders, see tools path auto and token and the module files are inside those folders. So one important thing to understand about composer is that composer doesn't know anything about Drupal. Really So, composer can download files, it can update files, but it can't do things like enable the module. So that's a separate step that we need to use either directly in Drupal itself like going through the interface going through the web interface. Or we need to use a Drupal specific tool, such as Drush. So Drush is a command line tool for Drupal. And you can use it for things like managing modules, clearing caches, resetting passwords, getting one time login links, and a lot of other stuff. Drush is installed by default in this Drupal composer project template that we started with. And we can run it by typing and again, this is from the root of the project, vendor, slash bin slash Drush. If I run that, it should show me a list of all the commands. All right, there we go. So you can run Drush commands by using that path. Now using vendor bin Drush. Every time like typing that all out, is a little bit tedious. And so if you want to be able to just run the command as Drush there is an add on project that you can install called Drush launcher. What Drush launcher does is it gives you a globally available command Drush that you can use anywhere on your server or your development environment. And it will figure out like if you're inside of a composer project, it will run the correct version of Drush. It sort of figures that out for you. I'm not going to go through how to install this you can read the instructions here. I will put a link to this in the video notes but Drush launcher is pre installed on the DrupalTutor Development Stack. So we can actually we can go ahead and use it like so if I just run the Drush command here, it will work and it's actually using the exact same Drush it's finding vendor been Drush and running it. Alright, so let's just use that. So to enable the path auto module, we'd run Drush in half auto. Right? And so it tells us that it's going to have to enable all three modules path auto seat tools and token so we'll answer yes. And now that is complete, if we just want to make sure it's working, if we go under configuration, if we go back to our Drupal site, we go configuration URL aliases, there should be a patterns tab. So here under URL aliases, yeah. So we have this patterns tab. That's actually where you set the patterns, that path auto module. Again, I'm not going to go into actually using it, but we know that path auto is actually installed, and it's working. So that's how you install the most recent version of a module from drupal.org. But what if you have a need for a specific version? Perhaps the latest version of some particular module has changes that conflict with other modules you're using, or maybe it conflicts with some custom code that you've written. So obviously, it would be best if you update your custom code or those other modules as soon as you can, but sometimes that may be different. Culture, it may take some time. So if the latest update to a particular module isn't security related, it's probably okay to hang back on an older version for just a little while until you get all the issues worked out. So I'm going to show you how you can install a specific version of a module. And we're just going to take an example, we're going to use the redirect module just sort of a random choice. At the time that I'm recording this, the most recent version of the redirect module is version 1.3. But let's pretend that the let's pretend there's some changes in version 1.3 that are going to break my site. So let's say that we needed to install version 1.2 instead, I'm going to show you now how we could do that with composer. So we'll start off with composer require Drupal slash redirect. All right. Now if we hit it, if we hit enter here, we'll get the most recent version. But that's not what we want. We want version 1.2. So we can specify a version by typing a colon, followed by that version number. Now on drupal.org, you'll see version number shown is like eight x dash and then a version number. You need to leave off the first part, so it's just the it's the part after the dash. So this should be in this case, one, two. So hit Enter. And now you'll see it says it's installing Drupal redirect one dot two dot zero. At this time, Drupal modules and themes Can't use this last digit of the version number, which is known as the patch version. All composer projects have three numbers here, major version minor version and patch. But Drupal modules and themes that are word that you're installing with composer can't use that third digit, at least at the time of recording, there is a an open issue that maybe in the future, they will be able to do that. But for now, you're always going to see zero there. So this is version 1.2. Even though it says one to zero. for Drupal core, you will see three versions so the current version, or sorry, three version numbers, the current version of Drupal is while I'm while I'm recording, this is eight dot seven dot one. So Drupal core makes use of all three numbers, but the modules and themes only use the first two. Okay, so now if you wanted to finish this up, we need to remember this hasn't actually enabled the module. This is only downloaded the module files. So if we wanted to enable the module, let's do it through the web interface this time, we can go to our website, go to extend. And then if I search for redirect, here it is and if I expand this we can see that we have the 1.2 version here. So I can turn that on. Click Install. And now the redirect module version 1.2 is installed on our site. So I think that's all you need to know about installing modules for Drupal eight with composer. I didn't show any themes in this video but if you're using a theme from drupal.org it everything works exactly the same way. So you use composer require Drupal slash the Name exactly the same as the modules. So that's all you need to know about installing Drupal modules and themes with composer