Configuration management

Drupal 8 has introduced CMI or Config Management Initiative. With it we are able to export the entire site configuration into separate .yml files and import it in a different environment.

With a more complex environments and projects also comes a need for a more complex configuration workflow. Since core does not provide all the necessary features we must rely on contrib modules.

The configuration files can be split into 4 categories based on the needs of the workflow:

1. Config where editors should not touch or change
2. Config where editors might create new entities
3. Config where editors might change, but need a default value
4. Config which relates to an environment

Config where editors should not touch or change

Site configuration such as content types, views, fields or module configurations such as file system or text formats should exist on the production environment, but should not be changed by the editors. Such configuration can only be updated from the configuration files.

Modules needed for this:

• Configuration sync (core)
• Configuration Read-only mode (optional, for being safe)

Config which relates to an environment

Ideally some parts of the config should be split and only used on specific environments. Any development modules such as Devel, Whops and even core modules UI parts should not be used on production environments. This means we should split configuration into several parts each for every environment.

Modules needed for this:

• Config split
• Chosen (optional, for better selection)