This import is empty and if applied would delete all of your configurations

Question

Customer bought a theme that has a Commerce plugin installed with sample data. Anxious to get it running and try out the new configuration system, I did what I do prior to Drupal 8.6: I committed everything but sensitive info into git, cloned to my local, and dumped the MySQL database. After getting the index page, every page returned a 500 error like the following ones.

Attempt to create a field commerce_remote_id that does not exist on entity type user

The entity type does not exist. in Drupal\Core\Entity\EntityTypeManager::getDefinition()

Copying all files from modules/commerce to modules/profile should get me past these errors.

drush updb returns no updates needed. drush cr offers no relief.

OK, I wanted to start using the new configuration system. On the customer site, I ran drush cex and committed to git.

On my local, after git pull, drush cim returns:

This import is empty and if applied would delete all of your configuration, so has been rejected.

It appears that Drush will not import, but I prefer to use drush site:install with an existing configuration.

Can Drush 9.5.2 install a new site onto itself using the existing settings.php file?

I would like to synchronize configuration files to remove that as a factor to resolve my local site being hosed.

I read in another tutorial that the UUID must be copied over because the UUIDs in system.site.yml must match. I can confirm they match by running drush config.get system.site.

Answer 1

Do double check the directory where the config files are located. The directory is set in settings.php like:

$config_directories['sync'] = 'sites/default/files/[...]/sync';

I had the same issue but moving the config directory to the correct place solved it.