Drupal “Recipes” Have Officially Landed in Drupal 10.3

Last year, we took an early look at the work going on in the Distributions and Recipes initiative in Drupal. A lot of progress has been made in that time, which we’re really excited about.

For some background, here are the posts we wrote, in case you missed them:

• Exploring the New “Recipes” Feature in Drupal 10
• Why We’re Exploring the “Recipes” Feature in Drupal 10

After a year-long effort by the Drupal community and extensive use case design and testing, the Recipes feature has been officially added to the upcoming release of Drupal 10.3!

On top of our articles from last year, I also released an example “Site Install” type Recipe to demonstrate how it worked. I’m proud to say that this became a popular and often referenced Recipe to help others learn and experiment with it at conferences and webinars.

In Drupal 10.3, users can officially craft their own Recipes.

From Nothing to a Working Site Foundation in Two Minutes

I installed a fresh copy of the Drupal 10.3 beta to take it for a test drive.

The entire process only took a few minutes. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to change anything from my original recipe posted a year ago.

I took the following steps. This assumes a basic composer.json manifest with drupal/core-recommended: ^10.3 in its requirements, using ddev as the local development stack.

ddev start 
ddev composer install 
ddev drush si minimal 
ddev composer require drupal/velir_base:^1.0 
ddev exec -d /var/www/html/docroot php core/scripts/drupal recipe recipes/contrib/velir-base 

That was it! After just a couple of minutes, I had a fully configured Drupal 10.3 site to our specifications and configuration values that came from our Recipe:

This is an amazing step forward for composable Drupal without the old historical issues of installation profiles and distributions. You can change Recipes and combine them at will while retaining control over your entire application stack.

As a developer, getting to this point used to take a half day to a day. Now you can recoup that time to develop and deliver features much faster. Recipes are the future of Drupal among other ongoing initiatives, like Drupal Starshot mentioned in my previous post. Drupal Starshot will be based entirely on Recipes to provide a starting point for new users and evaluators.

Additional Features with Recipes

In addition to applying a Recipe, if a Recipe depends on modules and includes a composer.json file that lists its requirements as ours does, applying the Recipe will automatically pull in those dependencies.

Optionally, you can “unpack” those to your root composer.json file for further tracking by tools like Renovate, Dependabot, or GitHub Actions so they can stay up to date.

Try Drupal Recipes Today

We have transitioned our original Recipe repository to living as an official project on drupal.org: https://www.drupal.org/project/velir_base

You can try it today in Drupal 10.3 to see how Recipes work, or to start your new projects like we do.

Want to learn more about Recipes and how you can use them to streamline your Drupal development? Contact us. Our team of Drupal experts can show you how to create and apply Drupal Recipes that save time and money so you can focus on developing valuable new features for your website.