Create a smaller Drupal core download, removing tests, for production sites.

... You should have described which directories you could remove. You might have for example not removed the phpunit tests from both core as
well as the vendor dependencies.

mbrett5062: I for one appreciate your efforts, and don't see this as a waste of time.

I've had this exact question burning in my mind for a while (when I worked out that there were some 7000 files and some 20MB of tests that will never be used on a production site). Yeah, you'll have those who'll say "disk space is cheap thesedays, stop whining", but thousands of files across a drupal install slow down source control systems and uploads (of the codebase to a production server) and all manner of things.

As a developer who lives outside a major city and has limited upload speed, the bloat of Drupal is a big deal to me. I manage Drupal through Subversion, so I don't upload directly very much (I tend to pull from one internet server to another when I deploy), but there are times - such as updating my master copy of Drupal in source control - where all that cruft bogs things down.

Rather than a separate core release for production, another option might be some kind of bundled automated process that can be run during config sync (or some other appropriate time) might be an option. Such a script could also remove all the test stuff from the vendor directory, and from contributed modules. Maybe the uninstall hook for the simpletest module would be a good place to run that?

Just to give people a bit more update. We do strip vendor tests, see Drupal\\Core\\Composer\\Composer::vendorTestCodeCleanup

@TheSchmuck
Nice idea! How about writing some script, and call this from drush/composer?

Great to see an issue about this. I'm starting a project at work to remove all test-libraries from our production servers just because phpunit has had atleast one remote code execution exploit in the last couple of years. And as phpunit is categorized as a test/dev-library it isn't sure that these kind of exploits gets fixed quickly.

Will follow this and share if I stumble on something useful/interesting.

Drupal 8.6.3 is a 16.4 MB download containing 20,369 items and using 83.8 MB on Ext4 disk. I did a quick test deleting just the directories containing tests and the result contains 12,059 items and uses only 48 MB on disk. If something as simple as that can save 35 MB per upload, it will make many uploads faster.

I look forward to a list of the changes you make.

I would like to voice my support for doing this.

I have a client on shared hosting with unlimited storage space but a limit on number of individual files. They've had to spend time finding files to delete ... and having 1200 files in core/modules/system alone is causing problems.

The problems are multiplied if you don't immediately zip your backups - or if you use drush, which saves unzipped backups to drush-backups.

I'd like to see test files be excluded from the default install, and only added in as a selectable option.

Thanks for proposing this!

I feel we should close this issue as a duplicate of #3067979: Exclude test files from release packages if we agree that we don't need a

new distribution of Drupal 8 core with all tests and Simpletest removed

but to remove tests altogether from release packages.

++ to 16-17