>>> [!note] Migrated issue <!-- Drupal.org comment --> <!-- Migrated from issue #3274999. --> Reported by: [alexpott](https://www.drupal.org/user/157725) >>> <p>This idea has <strong>graduated to a strategic initiative</strong> after Dries approved this as a strategic initiative during the Driesnote at DrupalCon Portland. This page is now archived in favor of <a href="https://www.drupal.org/about/core/strategic-initiatives-distributions-and-recipes">the official initiative documentation</a>.</p> <hr> <h2>Historical Information</h2> <h3>Background</h3> <p>The Distribution Modernization Initiative is a community effort modernize how distributions in Drupal work, as well as update how they are discovered and delivered by Drupal.org. </p> <p>Distributions have been proposed as key Drupal feature since <a href="https://dri.es/drupal-distributions">Dries blogged in 2006 about better support arriving in Drupal 5</a>. Drupal 8's configuration management system has underpinned some improvements for Distributions and there are a few successful distributions such as <a href="https://www.getopensocial.com/">Open Social</a>, <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/varbase">Varbase</a>, <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/contentacms">Contenta</a>, <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/thunder">Thunder</a>, and <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/localgov">LocalGov</a>.</p> <h3>Problem</h3> <p>Distributions are difficult:</p> <ul> <li>They are hard to discover before you install Drupal</li> <li>Once you've chosen to start with a distribution, switching the profile is hard</li> <li>Distributions are awkward on Drupal.org</li> <li>Distributions are hard to maintain over several Drupal release cycles</li> <li>Sites built on distributions can be hard to update - for example <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/panopoly">Panopoly</a> (a very popular D7 distribution) still does not have a stable D8 or 9 release. </li><li> </li></ul> <h3>Proposed resolution</h3> <p>We intend to implement:</p> <ul> <li>A new concept: <strong>Drupal Recipes</strong>. Drupal recipes allow the automation of Drupal module install and configuration via the user interface and via the Drupal recipe composer plugin.</li> <li>An improved concept: <strong>Composer project templates</strong>. Add new abilities to composer create-project for Drupal distributions to leverage in order to completely replace some of the special functionality of install profiles / starter kits / distributions.</li> </ul> <p>More documentation about the initiative can be found at: <a href="https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes">https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes</a></p> <p>We aim to:</p> <h4>Improve discovery</h4> <p>When you install Drupal for the first time you are presented with Standard, Minimal or the Umami Demo to install. We want to explore using the <a href="https://www.drupal.org/about/core/strategic-initiatives/project-browser">Project Browser</a> to allow a user to select a Drupal recipe whilst installing.</p> <h4>Allow multiple Drupal recipes to be used on the same project</h4> <p>If you choose a distribution, for example, OpenSocial, you cannot also install another distribution like Commerce Kickstart or Thunder to easily add e-commerce or professional publishing tools to your site. You're locked in. Multiple Drupal recipes can be installed on the same site.</p> <h4>Install a recipe at anytime in a project&rsquo;s life-cycle</h4> <p>Similarly, if after a few years of running your site built on standard Drupal you cannot use OpenSocial to add community collaboration tools to your site. We want to remove the barriers to do this.</p> <h4>Make it easier to maintain 100s of sites that have a common starting point</h4> <p>One use-case that distributions satisfy is to provide a way to start and maintain 100s of micro-sites. This is particularly common within the education sector. We want to make this easier and also ensure that any of the other changes don't make this harder.</p> <h4>Easier updates</h4> <p>One of the pain points maintaining distributions is providing updates to sites that are already using your distribution. Working out how to add new functionality to existing sites is hard because every existing site is in a different state. A few distributions are working together on the <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/update_helper">Update Helper module</a> and we're looking to bring this functionality to core.</p> <h4>Better support on drupal.org and via composer</h4> <p>Drupal.org support for distributions has been improved to identify distributions correctly and will support pushing distributions to packagist so they can be used as composer project templates.</p> <h4>Enable Drupal recipes to ship demo content</h4> <p>Many distributions provide example content as a way of introducing their functionality. At the moment distributions are doing this in many different ways, importing from CSV or using the Default content module. It's often complete something custom. We want to provide functionality in core and make it easy for a Drupal recipe to provide example content.</p> <h3>Process and where to find it</h3> <p>We meet fortnightly on Tuesday at 16:00 UTC in the <a href="https://drupal.slack.com/archives/C2THUBAVA">#distributions-and-recipes</a> channel in Drupal Slack. </p> <ul> <li>03:00 Tuesday - Australian Eastern Time (AET)</li> <li>21:30 Tuesday - India Standard Time (IST)</li> <li>17:00 Tuesday - Central European Time (CET)</li> <li>9:00 am Tuesday - Pacific Time (PT)</li> <li>When in doubt, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=1600+UTC+in+local+time">ask the oracle</a>.</li> </ul> <h3>Proposal roadmap</h3> <p>Drupal recipes: <a href="https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/docs/recipe_roadmap.md">https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/docs/recipe_roadmap.md</a><br> Composer project templates: <a href="https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/docs/composer_project_template.md#implementation-tasks-roadmap">https://git.drupalcode.org/project/distributions_recipes/-/blob/1.0.x/docs/composer_project_template.md#implementation-tasks-roadmap</a></p> <h3>Not in scope</h3> <ul> <li><span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-3"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/555212" title="Status: Closed (duplicate)">#555212: Install profile inheritance</a></span></li> </ul> <h3>Related work</h3> <ul> <li>The project browser initiative - hoping to use this to fix <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-1"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2818085" title="Status: Active">#2818085: [meta] Recipe downloads from the installer.</a></span></li> </ul> <h4>Existing core features</h4> <ul> <li>Installation system</li> <li>Update system</li> <li>Current distribution &amp; install profile functionality</li> </ul> <h4>Open core issues</h4> <p><span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link drupalorg-gitlab-link-wrapper"><a href="https://git.drupalcode.org/project/project_composer/-/issues/3252534" class="drupalorg-gitlab-link">https://git.drupalcode.org/project/project_composer/-/issues/3252534</a></span><br> <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-1"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3265281" title="Status: Active">#3265281: Use composer templates for starter kits instead of install profiles</a></span><br> <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-1"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3264926" title="Status: Active">#3264926: Split distribution functionality into a composer template and a module</a></span><br> <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-13"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/1497268" title="Status: Needs work">#1497268: Add revert functionality to Config entities</a></span><br> <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-4"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2114713" title="Status: Postponed">#2114713: Enable installation of distribution (install profile) at install time and provide curated list of available distros</a></span></p> <h4>Contributed projects</h4> <p>TBD - Not sure.</p> <h3>Team and resources</h3> <p>@todo: Does this need to be more specific than the following list?</p> <ul> <li>Members of the Drupal Core committer team</li> <li>People from the DA Engineering Team</li> <li>Maintainers of Distributions</li> <li>Other interested community members</li> <li>...</li> </ul> <h3>Signoffs</h3> <p>Dries signed off on the initiative as it was presented during the DriesNote at DrupalCon Portland.</p> > Related issue: [Issue #2818085](https://www.drupal.org/node/2818085)