[Meta] Expose Drupal Components outside of Drupal

Created on 29 October 2012, almost 13 years ago

Updated 21 May 2025, 3 months ago

Problem/Motivation

Drupal Components are abstracted parts of Drupal core. They can be used independently in their own projects. In order to use the Drupal Components outside of a Drupal project however, you have to download Drupal 8, and then copy/paste the files of the Drupal Component into your own project. This can be tedious and there are easier ways of exposing the components to outside projects.

Proposed resolution

Mimic how Symfony exposes its components and allow projects outside of Drupal to use the Drupal components by...

Introducing a composer.json for each component
Creating a subpath split in a new repository for each component: #2513388: Create (and maintain) a subtree split of each Drupal Component →
The subpath split needs to be automated as a post-commit hook or re-executed on a daily basis.
Post the components on https://packagist.org

For each item in the Drupal\Compnent namespace:

Add README, LICENSE, whatever else.
Ignore tests (for now).

The development process for these packages is:

People use the packages through Composer.
They find a bug.
They read TESTING.txt which says "You can't test this unless you get the full-stack Drupal."
They read the README.txt which says, "Find us in https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal → "
They start submitting patches on d.o.

Remaining tasks

Allow licensing text files in our coding standard.
Determine how to be flexible with licensing: #1713080: Allow code in Drupal\Component to be used by non-GPL projects →
The DA does, via our ownership of github's Drupal acct, and our ownership of the drupal/ namespace on packagist
Determine a composer.json template for components.
#2337283: Add a composer.json file to every component →
Create Drupal project issue components for each component released in this way.