Synchronizing Configuration
Versions with Joe Shindelar In this tutorial, we're going to look at how to synchronize the configuration between a development and live site using the core
Configuration Manager module. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to synchronize the complete set of configuration changes between a development site, and a live site. Before you get started with
this tutorial, you want to make sure that you are
familiar with the concept of configuration data, and how Drupal
makes use of it. And that you have both a live site,
and a development site set up. And the development site has
configuration changes made, that you would like to transfer to the live site. See the written version of this tutorial for links to each of these
prerequisite tutorials. For this example,
I've got 2 different sites, the Anytown Farmers Market
live site, and the development version
of the Anytown Farmers Market site. I've changed the site name of the
development version to make it clear. You can see that here. Both sites have a Vendors view
though I've made some changes to the one on the development
version of the site so that the configuration
differs from that of the live site. You can see here,
the name of the view, is List of Vendors on my development
site, and on my live site, it's just Vendors. There's a couple of other changes
as well. On the development site,
in the Manage administrative menu, navigate to Configuration.
Scroll down, and under Development click on Configuration synchronization, and then click on the Export tab. On the resulting page,
click the Export button. This will generate an archive
of the full site configuration data. You can save this file to your
local computer. Then, over on your live site,
or the destination where you would like to synchronize
the configuration to, in the Manage administrative menu,
click on Configuration and scroll down, and under
the Development section, click Configuration synchronization, and then click Import. Click the Choose File button and locate the file that you downloaded, that contains the archive
of your configuration from the development site, and upload that file. You can verify that the differences
shown are what you expect. You may see configuration items
that have been added, deleted or changed. For changed items,
you can click view differences, to see what the changes are. When you're satisfied, click Import all to import
the configuration changes. After completed, you should
see a message that says, The configuration was imported
successfully. If I navigate back to the
homepage of my live site, I can confirm that this worked
by seeing that the name of this tab was changed from Vendors,
to List of Vendors. In this tutorial, we learned
how to create and import an archive that represents all of the configuration on a particular site and how to move that configuration between development and live sites.
