Talking Drupal #470 - Creating Recipes

October 07, 2024

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.

Listen:

direct Link

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

 

Module of the Week

Features
  • 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:
  • 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