I want to install a local Drupal site in such a way that Drupal core is a git repository so I can work on patches.
Just doing a git clone doesn't work, because I also need tools such as Drush, and installing those in a git clone of core changes the composer.json file that belongs to core.
What's the correct way of doing this?
I am not sure if there really is a correct, or best way. All of the core devs I have interacted with have their own setup that works best for them.
My general setup is
I do this because I have a bunch of shell scripts for installing, cleaning, diffing, generating patches, running tests, etc. All of these scripts get ignored.
As far as drush goes, I keep a global install and checkout a tag periodically. I then have a .envrc in each branch directory to $PATH everything correctly. This prevents changes to composer.json.
However, there are some things you can try. A while ago, running tests locally with certain PHP versions meant updating phpunit via a post-composer script. You then had to restore composer.json and composer.lock before running a git diff ... to generate a patch/interdiff. You can do the something similar with drush:
The above approach is on my short-list for updates to my scripts.
composer install on?
git clone, checkout the branch I want, then composer install. You want a git clone of the official repo so that the git indexes matches up when you have tricky applies/rerolls.
origin afterwards. If I don't, then the lockfile never changes. I have never found it to be a hassle. The core dependencies are mostly stable; they tend to change near a release if bumping the Symfony point releases change. I worked on at least five issues this weekend, and don't think I needed to worry about composer once.
I solve this by installing Drush separately (I'm still using Drush 8), then I can run Drush commands on installs of Drupal that are downloaded with git.
I followed the preferred-install source like I documented for contrib modules which fits my needs.
composer create-project --no-install drupal/recommended-project:8.8.x-dev se-291135
cd se-291135/
This results in a require of ^8.8 (like 8.8.2) so we need to edit composer.json and change all those occurrences into 8.8.x-dev and add the preferred-install
"config": {
"preferred-install": {
"drupal/core": "source",
"*": "dist"
},
...
Not sure why I had to remove the lock file :-/
rm composer.lock
Installing with these settings we get a drupal/code in web/core with a detached head. Fix that and we are almost done.
composer install
cd web/core
git checkout origin/8.8.x
To make sure our patches matches drupal a git diff alias would help like
alias corediff='git diff --src-prefix=a/core/ --dst-prefix=b/core/'
composer update or composer install? How do you add Drush?