Why?

  • Deployment
  • A predictable and robust system

What is configuration?

  • It is not state (e.g. time of last cron run)
  • It is not cache
    • Too expensive to use as a cache
    • Needs to be rebuilt
  • It is not content
  • It is everything that is left
    • Any information to synchronise from development to production

Types of configuration

  • Simple configuration
    • There can be only one instance
    • e.g. Site name
  • Configuration entities
    • There can be none, one or many
    • e.g. Node types, fields, vocabularies, filter formats, views…

Using configuration

  • Reading
    • Simple - $site_name = \Drupal::config('system.site')->get('name');
    • Configuration entities - $node_type = NodeType::load('article');
  • Creating
    • Typically during installation
      • Simple - module_name/config/install/module_name.settings.yml
      • Optional - module_name/config/optional/views.view.settings.yml
    • Through the API - $config->set('key', 'value');

Configuration entity dependencies

  • Modules
  • Themes
  • Configuration entities
  • Content
  • Implicit dependency on the module that declares it

How are the dependencies defined?

  • From the name e.g. node.type depends on the node module
  • From their own data
  • 3rd party settings. Other modules can change the settings.
    • ::setThirdPartySetting($module, $key, $value);
    • ::getThirdPartySetting($module, $key, $default = NULL);

Other types of dependencies

  • Content
    • e.g. Content block module depends on content in the block
  • Enforced
    • e.g. A module that defines a new node type. The new node type config depends on that module.