So you want to make your own Drupal 8 Distribution?

At the University of California, Davis, we are developing a Drupal distribution that will be used by over a thousand sites across campus. We're using Drupal 8 because we want to be on the bleeding edge of the best Web technology available!

With so many moving pieces, many of them new to Drupal 8, we have established a methodology for:

• Front-end development with PatternLab
• Git repository and branching strategy
• Composer require, install, update strategy
• Automated builds and tests
• Deployments to multiple hosts
• Pitfalls, gotchas, and things to keep in mind

What I will present is by no means THE way to do it, but it is A way to do it that has been successful for us, and I plan to leave time at the end for discussion on best practices. This is all so new, we're all just working with "practices". It's going to take some time and discussion to determine what the "best practices" will be. But this is a start.

I will assume that you already know something about Git, as well as a general idea of what a Drupal Distribution is.