Composer template for Drupal projects with CiviCRM

This project template provides a starter kit for managing your Drupal 8 and CiviCRM site with Composer.

It's based on drupal-composer/drupal-project, so please see that project for general information on managing Drupal via composer.

The documentation here is going to be focused on CiviCRM!

Usage

You need a couple of dependencies first:

• Composer (at a relatively recent version)
• Bower
• Git

Make sure that you have a recent version of Composer! A couple of people have tried to use this project with older versions and have experienced issues.

After that you can create your new project via:

composer create-project roundearth/drupal-civicrm-project:8.x-dev some-dir --no-interaction

Drupal will be installed under the web directory, with the vendor directory outside of the webroot. This follows current best practices, but it means two additional things:

• You'll need to point your webserver at the web directory, not the top-level directory like you might be used to with Drupal 7, or non-composer Drupal 8 sites.
• The CiviCRM web assets are synced to the web/libraries/civicrm directory, so you'll need to configure CiviCRM's "Resource URL" to point to the URL that will reach that directory.

Installing CiviCRM

After getting the code using the command-line above, and doing the normal Drupal 8 installation, perform the following steps to install CiviCRM:

1. Ensure the web/sites/default directory is writeable. On the command-line:

   chmod +w web/sites/default
   

2. Enable the CiviCRM module. On the command-line:

   drush en -y civicrm
   

3. If you were already logged into the Drupal site, then logout and log back in again. This is to work around bug CRM-19878.

4. Change the "Resource URL" to [cms.root]/libraries/civicrm. You can do this by visiting the path http://example.com/civicrm/admin/setting/url?reset=1 (replacing example.com with your real site name).

5. Clearing caches.

How does it work?

It's basically 'drupal-composer/drupal-project' with a special Composer plugin added, which does all the additional steps for CiviCRM. So, if you want to understand its behavior or contribute, see the Composer plugin:

https://gitlab.com/roundearth/civicrm-composer-plugin

Specifically, it's this file that does all the real work:

https://gitlab.com/roundearth/civicrm-composer-plugin/blob/master/src/Handler.php

How to add CiviCRM to an existing Drupal 8 site?

Assuming your Drupal 8 site is based on 'drupal-composer/drupal-project', you can simply add the special Composer plugin for CiviCRM:

https://gitlab.com/roundearth/civicrm-composer-plugin

References

• https://www.mydropwizard.com/blog/better-way-install-civicrm-drupal-8