Add daily email for 2025-01-14

Patching Drupal

source/_daily_emails/2025-01-14.md

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+title: Patching Drupal
+date: 2025-01-14
+permalink: daily/2025/01/14/patching-drupal
+tags:
+  - software-development
+  - drupal
+cta: ~
+snippet: |
+  Although patches aren't used to contribute to Drupal any more, you can still apply patches to Drupal code in your own projects.
+---
+
+Yesterday I wrote about [how I used a patch file to customise a project in my Nix configuration][0].
+
+I'm familiar with patch files from my Drupal contributions, when we used to create and upload patch files and attach them to issues to contribute changes.
+
+Although patches aren't used to contribute to Drupal any more, you can still apply patches to Drupal code in your own projects if you need to.
+
+If there's a customisation or fix you need you need to apply, instead of altering and "hacking" the source files, you can apply changes with patch files.
+
+Instead of Nix, I use [composer-patches][1] to automatically apply patches when running `composer install`.
+
+For example, in my composer.json file, I can add something like this:
+
+```json
+"extra": {
+    "patches": {
+        "drupal/default_content": {
+            "Issue #2698425: Do not reimport existing entities (https://www.drupal.org/project/default_content/issues/2698425#comment-15593214)":  "patches/default_content-2698425-do-not-reimport-196.patch",
+            "Issue #3160146: Add a Normalizer and Denormalizer to support Layout Builder (https://www.drupal.org/project/default_content/issues/3160146#comment-14814050)": "patches/default_content-3160146-53.patch"
+        }
+    },
+},
+```
+
+This will apply these two patch files to the Default Content module (which are the same as running `git diff` between two commits), which I needed to do for a recent project.
+
+If the upstream issue is fixed and the patch is no longer needed, they can be removed and the module can be updated to the latest version.
+
+And this works for core and contrib projects.
+
+The same as the tmux-sessionizer example, this approach means I can apply any changes without needing to duplicate or alter the code, and it makes it easy to contribute by testing other people's patches or applying and contributing your own.
+
+[0]: {{site.url}}/daily/2025/01/13/patches
+[1]: https://github.com/cweagans/composer-patches