Add daily email for 20/04/25

source/_daily_emails/2025-04-20.md

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+---
+title: Automate Drupal deployments with configuration
+date: 2025-04-20
+permalink: daily/2025/04/20/config
+tags:
+  - software-development
+  - drupal
+cta: ~
+snippet: |
+  Instead of manually creating the same content types, fields, blocks and configuration, use Drupal's configuration management system to automate the changes and re-apply them the same way every time.
+---
+
+Almost all Drupal projects have multiple environments - production and one or more pre-production environments.
+
+A lot have development and staging, some have QA or UAT, or an environment per feature or sprint.
+
+Each Developer has their own local environment to work on.
+
+As new things are added, such as content types, fields and views, they need to be present on all environments.
+
+When I started using Drupal, I needed to perform the same steps to manually recreate the changes on each environment.
+
+Later, people started to use the Features module to export configuration into modules that could be committed and deployed as code.
+
+This was accompanied by "deploy" modules that included update hooks to revert features or perform other tasks.
+
+Since version 8, Drupal has had the Configuration Synchronization module.
+
+Developers make changes once and export them to files using a simple command like `drush config:export`.
+
+Once the code has been deployed to each environment, run `drush config:import` to import the changes.
+
+This will synchronise the configuration on the environment, making it the same as the exported configuration in an automated way - the same way every time.
+
+Much quicker and more robust than doing it manually.