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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T02:43:37+00:00

I am developing Drupal sites sometimes. This development involves writing custom module and of

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I am developing Drupal sites sometimes. This development involves writing custom module and of course lots of configuration work on the admin interface.

I keep track of my custom module using SCM (git of course..). Unfortunately the configuration of all the drupal modules is even more important and fragile. These settings are spread in the database and therefore cannot be easily kept track of.

I create backup of my development DB on a daily basis, but having realized that something went wrong it is a pain to compare the backup with the actual state to hunt for differences.

Do you have any best practices or suggestions how to do it professionally? (I still use Drupal 6 if that matters, but I’m interested in new features of the 7 and 8 versions as well) I read about the Feature module that is very promising, but not exactly what I need.

My first ideas were (1) a module that would store all the settings in files that can be tracked with SCM easily, or (2) some automatism that would export the tables into files every time something changes

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  1. Editorial Team

    More and more configuration can be moved into SCM as time goes by.

    At the state of Drupal 7 some people start developing their sites as an installation profiles. E.g:
    http://walkah.net/blog/every-drupal-site-install-profile/

    Features are another way of tracking changes and usefull to change configuration over time, e.g. when several people working on a site and want to share their configuration which they build on their local dev machine. The usability of features can be enhanced using ctools and drush (See Drush CTools Export Bonus module as if you take that route).

    For quick import/export of Node types, Taxonomy, User, Field API fields and Field groups http://drupal.org/project/bundle_copy seems a good option.

    Here is a good blog post about the different options: http://palantir.net/blog/multi-headed-drupal

    With Drupal 8 we’ll see a big shift in configuration management as configuration export will be built into core. There are several core initiatives and one is the configuration management initiative. A backport of some of the functionality is available as a Drupal 7 module.

    Besides this a way I like to handle things when working is to note the things I have changed with my time or in the issue tracker of the projekt I am working on.

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