Join us at our August Drupal Users Group Meetup.
Presenter: Jeff Cardwell
Topic: Getting Started with Composer and Drupal 8
What is Composer? Why should I care? If we plan on producing Drupal 8 websites, we really should know a bit about Composer. It will be baked into Drupal for the foreseeable future, and the sooner we get started with it, the less pain we’ll be in for.
“Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP.” If you’re familiar with using Drush “make” files to develop and deploy Drupal websites, then the principles behind Composer will seem like old hat. If you’ve never gotten around to leveraging tools to manage the versions and dependencies of your spiderweb of Drupal modules and code, then there is no better time to start!
I’m going to cover the basics of Composer, including what it is, where it came from, and why we need to use it as a tool. Then we’re going to discuss the current relationship between Composer and Drupal. With an eye towards keeping abreast of the evolving “right” way to do things, we will use the command line to build a new Drupal 8 installation from scratch. Then we’ll take a look at the tools and templates already in place that can make our lives easier… and we’ll build another site using those. This time we’ll look at the differences and discuss some of the best practices we should use going forward.
By the end of the talk, my hope is that you will be able to use Composer on your next Drupal 8 project. You will have a series of commands that you should be able to copy and paste to get you started. I’ll also try to equip you to evaluate some of the development options that using Composer in your workflow can allow.
Details about location, parking, etc can be found at the meetup page http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Drupal-Users-Group/events/229820401/.