Talking Drupal #470 - Creating Recipes

Oct 7, 2024

In this discussion, Jim Birch, a Drupal specialist and the head of a team at Canopy Studios, shares insights on creating effective recipes for Drupal environments. He explains the significance of the Recipe Author Guide and delves into practical tips for managing dependencies and ensuring streamlined execution. Birch also highlights the evolution of the Drupal Recipes Initiative, inviting community members to contribute to its growth. Listeners will discover how efficient configuration management can enhance their site development experience.

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Episode notes

Intro

00:00 • 3min

Exploring the Features Module and Recipes in Drupal

03:13 • 21min

Creating and Managing Drupal Recipes

24:29 • 26min

Mastering Recipe Creation and Execution

50:12 • 18min

Creating Drupal Recipes

01:07:51 • 9min

Engaging with the Drupal Recipes Initiative

01:16:28 • 4min

Connecting with the TalkingDrupal Community

01:20:37 • 2min

Today we are talking about Creating Recipes, What Recipes already exist, and helpful tips and tricks with guest Jim Birch. We’ll also cover Features as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/470

Topics

What are recipes
How do you recommend someone get started writing recipes
Where can people find recipes
Can you include sub recipes
How should you test recipes
Any tools that make writing recipes easier
What recipes are needed that do not exist
How can people move recipes forward

Resources

Guests

Jim Birch - linkedin.com/in/jimbirch thejimbirch

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Aubrey Sambor - star-shaped.org starshaped

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted an admin UI to manage sets of configuration, to version and share across Drupal sites? There’s a module for that.
Module name/project name:
- Features
Brief history
- How old: created in Mar 2009 by yhahn, though recent releases are by Dave Reid
- Versions available: 7.x-2.15 and 8.x-3.14, the latter of which works with Drupal 9.4 and 10
Maintainership
- Minimally maintained
- Security coverage
- Test coverage
- Documentation: Has a documentation guide and probably hundreds if not thousands of of tutorials available
- Number of open issues: 610 open issues, 54 of which are bugs against the 8.x branch
Usage stats:
- Almost 117,000 sites, though the majority are using the D7 version
Module features and usage
- Many listeners will remember Features as the de facto solution for configuration management in Drupal 7 and earlier
- As the name implies, it was really intended to share common capabilities across different Drupal sites
- Unlike recipes, Features can have version numbers, because there is a path to sync configuration updates across sites using a Feature, though this is where a lot of teams found Features could be complex to use
- We did previously cover Features as MOTW all the way back in episode #147, but I thought it was relevant to today’s discussion because of the way it provides a UI for organizing and exporting specific sets of configuration
- There is an open issue for Features to directly export recipes, because it already does a lot of the time-consuming work of collecting together necessary config files, including dependencies
- Even its current state, it could be a time saver for anyone wanting to start creating their own recipes