Configuration Management

There are lots of different approaches to managing Backdrop CMS configuration files in Git, but this one is my favorite. It works great for projects with multiple developers, and it can also be easily adapted for multiple deployment environments, as on Pantheon.

This versioned staging directory strategy has been adapted from a recommendation from @populist and @davidstrauss based on how the config directory is being managed for Drupal 8/9/10 on Pantheon.

When moving from traditional web hosting to managed platform-specific hosting providers like Pantheon, there are often a few tricks you'll need to work around. In this post I'll be documenting the steps necessary to move an existing website onto Pantheon.

Step 1: Create a new website on Pantheon

As someone who manages dozens of websites, I love Pantheon's upstreams. Whenever there is a security update for Drupal core or for Backdrop core, the provided one-click core update saves me a lot of time. Whenever I start a new Pantheon project or moving an existing site onto Pantheon, I want to start from an upstream.

I'll start by creating my site from Backdrop's Pantheon upstream.

I also like to run the installer to get a working Backdrop site (you'll see why later). I will replace various parts in the steps that follow.

I've written about how to manage your configuration directory in version control (Git) several times, but now that I've done it in the wild on a few different sites, I thought I'd write it up here as well.

Note: this figure-8 approach works best when there is only a single developer on the project. If there is more than one, this approach can get confusing, and I prefer the versioned staging directory approach.

Below I have outlined how I set up most of my sites, with the Git root a directory above the webroot. This allows me to keep things that should not be web-accessible (like config!) in version control.