Use drupal-project instead of a bare Drupal site

[weitzman]

What happened (or feature request):

The install docs successfully got me up and running with a Drupal site. Hurray!

The docs suggest getting drupal via git clone git@github.com:drud/drupal8.git. A more modern way to start a Drupal project is composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev [drupal8] --stability dev --no-interaction. See https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project. Among other goodies, this gets you a site local drush which is the only real supported way to run drush with drupal 8.4 (coming next month).

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[beeradb]

hi Moshe! Thanks for submitting this. I'll walk through the changes in a few minutes here.

[beeradb]

This worked as advertised for me.

We should absolutely make this change, as pointing people to the drud/drupal8 repo is doing them a disservice as it's currently out of date and we're unlikely to actually maintain it. I think this is just a case where test repos made it into docs without anyone thinking through the ramifications.

My only real concerns with this are:

• This increases the install time considerably. We've set internal targets of < 5 minutes for ddev download to having your first site installed. However, I'm not sure we can actually avoid making this change as it's the direction Drupal is moving. The composer install time alone is 2:35.55 for me.

• Our integration tests use the repo we are replacing. It would probably be wise to make them use the composer based method just to keep our docs and tests in sync.

My concerns are just things we need to be aware of when changing this, but they shouldn't prevent us from doing so.

Thanks for noticing the issue and submitting a PR @weitzman!

[rfay]

Just for clarification -

The docs suggest getting drupal via git clone git@github.com:drud/drupal8.git. A more modern way to start a Drupal project...

There isn't any intention at all that people would start a drupal site using our testing repo (drud/drupal8). Rather, drud/drupal8 is more of a demo repo, like an already built repo, ready for some maintenance. I'd say it's poorly named and probably poorly targeted, but we'd never suggest that anybody start a Drupal site from it.

[rickmanelius]

I'll need to create a different meta issue on composer. It'll be interesting to balance the competing needs and problems being surfaced in the community. Notably, how do we support users that want to leverage composer through the entire life cycle and yet abstract it away for those that don't want to deal with it. See this active Drupal.org issue Use Composer to build sites without forcing users to learn Composer

[weitzman]

My suggestion is to embrace the Composer users. The laggards have no money to spend, and no hunger to improve their dev environment. They are not likely to become DRUD customers (statistically speaking).

[rfay]

I'm all in favor of improving the doc to emphasize current best practices, as long as we can end up focusing on the main point, which is how you set up ddev. Mostly, the setup of a particular codebase is not nearly as important, and people already know how to do it. We're definitely not wanting to show people how to do Wordpress or Drupal development here, just trying to get them started with ddev. I suspect this should be a Wordpress example though because of usage numbers (but again, we shouldn't be implying that we're teaching them how to start a site from scratch, or tell them to clone wordpress.)

[rickmanelius]

@rfay I'm good with this from a documentation standpoint. I was getting hung up on this being the repo we maintain and/or use for our Circle CI testing.

[rfay]

Thanks so much for this contribution @weitzman and for pushing us along the right path. I'm sure we're going to need to revisit to get things really clear for the end-user, but again, this gives us a great nudge for the D8 world. Thanks for coaching us here!