Drupal provides its own functions for enabling modules or reverting features, however, most of them run silently without feedback so they are inappropriate for use in hook_update_N because they do not provide any feedback as to what is happening and whether it was a success or failure. This module gives voice to many of those functions. Every method that can be used within a hook_update_N() includes detailed feedback and logging of what was attempted and what the results were. Updates are Failed if the requested operation was not successful so that they can be run again, or re-worked.

Commit the composer.json changes to the repo. The files downloaded by Composer do not need to be added to the repo. You’ll see a .gitignore file that keeps them out (this was added as a part of the composer packaging). Only composer.json, .gitignore, code in /web/modules/custom and the content of the /web/sites subdirectory (other than the files directory) will be stored in the git repository.

The content staging solution for Drupal 8 is based on a re-designed version of the Deploy module. This solution consists of some contrib modules and depends on three Drupal core modules. The core dependencies are Entity API, Serialization and Restful Web Services. The contributed module dependencies are Relaxed Web Services, Multiversion, Key-value Extensions and (soon) Deploy. The Relaxed Web Services module provides a Restful/Relaxed JSON API and endpoints for entities, file attachments, administrative tasks like revisions comparison, starting/stopping replication, etc.

Modern multitier software architecture allows us to separate concerns when we are building a web application. For example, when there is a request to visualize a content item in Drupal, the request is handed off to a logical handler (module), which should be using some kind of API to read the necessary data from the database. And once it has assembled that data it should invoke the theming engine and its current theme in order for the final output to be rendered all ready to be sent back to the browser that made the request in the first place.