Maintaining Drupal distributions

When developing for Drupal 8, a solid understanding of configuration management is essential. Tools like Composer and Drush, a Continuous Integration Pipeline, several contributed Drupal modules and the Drupal core functionalities for managing configuration and code updates help immensely.

However, there are still pitfalls. The orchestration of the above tools and their dependencies is not trivial when implementing new custom features. You may have to deal with fragile update workflows for development team members, insufficiently tested updates, and strong differences across projects built on your Drupal distribution. Drupal.org is also not always helpful solving acute problems, because many Drupal developers are only on the hunt for ready-to-use modules.

While developing our Drupal distribution deGov (https://drupal.org/project/degov) we have learned a lot about configuration and feature management. Most strategies and workflows we employ on a daily basis we learned on our own.

The aim of this session is an exchange of know-how about update maintainership of Drupal distributions.