Configuration

Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

The configuration management module enables the ability to keep track of specific configurations on a Drupal site, provides the ability to move these configurations between different environments (local, dev, qa, prod), and also move configurations between completely different sites (migrate configurations).

For the most part this module provides the same functionality as the features module. Features module is currently the go to tool for moving configuration from environment to environment and site to site, and it does a great job doing this, but "configuration management" was never really what features was intended to do. The goal of features module was to group configurations together to satisfy a certain use-case. Instead most people use features to export configuration to code to ease with deployment between environments. Many of us have experienced the shortcomings of using features module for configuration management and found where it doesn't quite work to easily manage configuration. A couple other modules have spawned off to help with some of these shortcomings: features override, features plumber, Features Tools.

Essentially this module is a rewrite of the features module to remove the features part of features, and just manage configuration.

This module takes some concepts from the Drupal 8 core configuration management initiative, specifically the concept of the "activestore" and "datastore" architecture. Read up on how Drupal 8 will manage configurations to get an idea of how this module manages configuration between the activestore and datastore.

The module knows where configuration was changed and allows users to either "activate" a configuration that was changed in the datastore, or "write" to datastore if a configuration was changed in the activestore. If you enable the diff module, you can see the what is in the activestore vs. datastore.

The granularity of managing configuration is down to each specific configuration, rather than an entire group of configurations (feature module). This makes it easier to activate or write to file specific configurations, without having to "features-update" an entire group of configurations or "features-revert" an entire group.