Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.I have been using both the update manager in Drupal and using Composer when it was required to install a contrib module - specifically Address. During an update to the latest 8.3.2 moving the required core files and using update manager (/update.php) the process undid the previous installation of the contrib module Address and broke my site because it could no longer find the dependencies for Address.
As i've been experimenting with Drupal 8.3.x and contrib modules in anticipation of upgrading a Drupal 7 site, from what I've understood from reading docs/forums etc. is that you can use both methods (update.php and Composer).
Now I'm not so sure and wondering if this information should be clarified in the 8 documentation. That if you are going to use contrib modules that require Composer to install/update than you will have to use it to update core as well or else it will break your site.
If you must use Composer to install a contrib module and this requirement may break that install using the Drupal gui then this really needs to be included in the documentation and will raise the barrier for non-developers
Related:
- Allow upgrading core with the update manager https://www.drupal.org/node/606592
- Do not leave non-experts behind: do not require Composer unless a GUI is also included https://www.drupal.org/node/2845379
- Disable update manager for Address https://www.drupal.org/node/2753921
- Allow the Update Manager to automatically resolve Composer dependencies https://www.drupal.org/node/2538090
Comments
Comment #2
cilefen CreditAttribution: cilefen commentedThere is a critical issue to document it #2867757: Improve instructions for updating composer.json and /vendor. What was the UI action that broke the site? I think it was already broken in places when you executed /update.php as a result of the new files in /vendor (which were missing Address's dependencies).
Comment #3
cilefen CreditAttribution: cilefen commentedComment #4
lias CreditAttribution: lias commented@cilefen - thanks for link, I will follow that issue.
If I understand your question correctly, the UI action was updating the site to Drupal 8.3.2 from 8.3.1 after I had installed previously installed Address using Composer. Address was the only module that required Composer of the one's I've installed on a dev site.
I've been able to roll back that update and start over. This time I updated to 8.3.2 using Composer and it seems the update went as expected although from what I've been reading, updating Drupal this way leaves the core files like index.php untouched.
I followed this site page for instructions: https://glamanate.com/blog/managing-your-drupal-project-composer
Comment #13
smustgrave CreditAttribution: smustgrave at Mobomo commentedThe docs mentioned have since been updated see https://www.drupal.org/docs/updating-drupal/updating-drupal-core-manuall...