Develop Drupal 8 Distributions faster with Composer

Why build the Lightning distribution?

Drupal distributions can be a great tool for accelerating Drupal site development, but they can also be an onerous technical undertaking. Why did we build Lighting and why should site-builders use it?

The project needs a project

In order to encourage people to use composer, we needed a way for them to quickly get started.

You can’t patch dependencies of dependencies - or can you?

We ended up contributing a patch to the patch package itself so that it would build our project the way we wanted - that is, with Lightning as a dependency that defines patches.

It’s projects all the way down (why your project itself needs to be build-able)

You need an easy way for developers to build from the distro repo itself so that they can contribute in a consistent manner, without barriers.

Giving up old distro tricks of the trade (saying goodbye to commit hashes)

Hello mega-patches!

The pain of supporting legacy makefiles and tarballs

Releasing schedules, encouraging bad habits, and dependencies.