Configuration settings transfer from developer machine to production

Question

Hello All, Thanks for your time. I am new to Drupal. I am working on a website and lets assume I am testing 10 modules and select that "X" module suits me well. Now I configure this module to my requirements and then see that this suits the project really well. As you know some modules like profile module may have 10's of form fields which can be time taking to do.

So, is there any way that we transfer some file/s from developer machine to Production machine that will set these configuration settings and configured form fields which avoids re-doing the whole thing over again? Why I need this is, I am in East coast and there are couple of developers on west coast with whom I might have to collaborate. So, I am in desperate need of this kinda system.

Thanks for your help once again.

Answer 1

Take a look at the Strongarm module. Lullabot recently had a blog post on a development workflow that included Strongarm, "Site Development Workflow: Keep it in Code."

Answer 2

The Drupal way is to keep installing modules on top of more modules until your application does what you want.

Strongarm might be the best solution. But you can also write an update hook that sets the values in your variables table. So this way your changes are captured in code.

You'll need to take a look at your variables tables and possibly the admin form in your module to see what values it stores. It kinda sucks that you have to do that.

Writing update hooks is good practice when you're collaborating. It's akin to Ruby on Rails migration technique. I can't remember using the word "akin" before!

See:
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_update_N
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/variable_set

You should also encourage your team to regularly grab a copy of the database from one definitive location so, if you make changes to the schema, it's likely that your team will pick up those changes soon enough (after you've applied them). But that's not really a guarantee. Just a half decent form of risk management.