Cloning a Drupal website without content

Question

Drupal 8 ships with the new Configuration Management System. This system checks the sites UUID and only allows imports of configuration if the uuid is the same.

This means, your steps to create a new environment is:

1. dump db from existing environment
2. import db to new environment
3. import config in new environment

This however does not work in cases where one is not allowed to access Production data. How would one in this case then handle the creation of new environments?

Same goes for a new developer entering the project, he has to import a DB from prob/stg. But what if this db multiple GB's big. You are now running a multi GB website on your local machine.

In symfony we "solve" this with fixtures to create dummy data. this can then be used to create new environments from scratch on the fly. In Drupal 7 this was also possible with features.

So my question is, how does one do this in Drupal 8 if cloning the existing environment is forbidden? How do you sync configuration between these environments?

Answer 1

Have a look at Config Installer. It allows you to the initial install already based on your exported configuration and so replaces step 2 and 3.

One problem is that you might notice that there is more "content" or non-configuration stuff than you'd think (unfortunately). Menu Links created in the UI are content, aliases are content, translations are stored in a separate table too, Taxonomies/Terms as well (Fine for something like a free-tagging field, but they are often used to define fixed structures as well, like sections on a news site).