CheapWindowsHosting.com | Best and cheap Drupal 8.1.2 hosting. We’ll discuss the biggest core API change, then how moving to 8.1.2 affects various use cases.
You may recall that the migration support in core is experimental – that is, it is still open to backwards-compatibility-breaking changes. There is a big one in 8.1.2 – migrations themselves are now plugins rather than configuration entities. This reduces technical debt, in the form of migration-specific infrastructure that’s now being handled by standard core features. Specifically, the plugins themselves serve the function that migration templates did in 8.0.x – they provide default configuration for migrations which require additional configuration (in particular, a database connection) to become runnable. In addition, the migration system’s home-grown builder system (used to generate, say, bundle-specific migrations from one generic node template) is now replaced by standard plugin derivatives.
The lack of configuration entities, however, presents challenges for general-purpose migration tools. One is that there is now no direct core support for persisting configuration changes for the plugins – any configuration (such as a database connection) injected into a migration plugin is only applied at runtime, and without a standard method of persisting that configuration a general-purpose tool (such as the drush commands in migrate_tools) has no way of knowing what to inject or how. Likewise, we have the goal of developing tools for creating migrations from scratch through a UI, and the core migration approach of plugin configuration provided by YAML files within a module isn’t dynamic enough for this – again, we need a dynamic way to persist the configuration.
Another issue is discovery – a tool like drush migrate-status wants to show you all “relevant” migrations (migrations which have been fully configured and are runnable), but with core full of migration plugins which aren’t relevant in most cases (and there’s virtually no case where they would all be relevant) simply discovering all the plugins and instantiating them doesn’t work. The irrelevant plugins throw a variety of exceptions, some during the initial discovery (making them difficult to handle) – perhaps worse, some give no indication at discovery or instantiation time so cannot be filtered out without hardcoded knowledge.
At this point the cleanest answer I could come up with to the discovery problem was a registration process – an explicit way to mark a migration as eligible to be managed by the tools. And one means of “registering” a migration is to create a configuration entity for it, which (compared to a pure registration implementation like migration in Drupal 7 had) has the advantage of addressing the configuration persistence issues as well. So, that’s what I’ve done.
The migrate_plus module now defines a Migration configuration entity akin to that which was in core in 8.0.x – but cleaner. You’ll find that unlike 8.0.x Migration entities, which contained a huge amount of functionality, the migrate_plus 8.1.x Migration entity class consists of pretty much nothing but annotation and schema – a much cleaner use of the configuration entity system. The migration functionality is contained within the core Migration plugin class. So, how does the entity relate to the plugin? Let’s look first at how the core migration plugins are defined.
So, it sounds like we’ve got two different kinds of migration plugins now, right? No, not really – what we have is two distinct means of providing migration plugins with their configuration. For comparison’s sake:
If you’re looking to simply upgrade your Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 as-is, the big news here is that the upgrade UI (formerly part of the migrate_upgrade contrib module) is now in core as the migrate_drupal_ui module. It works the same as it did previously – provide your database credentials and source of your public files and go. It should be noted that the previous support for rolling back or performing incremental migrations after an initial upgrade has been removed – the premise is that rather than doing a rollback, you should expect to reinstall Drupal 8 and rerun the upgrade from scratch. The contrib migrate_upgrade module still provides the migrate-upgrade drush command (as well as migrate-upgrade-rollback).
While the plan is to eventually provide UI tools to make it easy to customize Drupal-to-Drupal migration paths (omit a content type here, map an old field to a differently-named new one there, etc.), in the meantime people have to use drush migrate-upgrade –configure-only to tweak their upgrade paths. More details on this workflow will follow – for the moment, the main thing to be aware of is that (after a period of absence) –configure-only is back and can be used to generated configuration entities which you can then edit to your specific needs.
Because the new migration plugin manager reads the migration_templates directory for backward compatibility (and because the source/process/destination plugins have not changed), in most cases contrib modules implementing upgrade paths should not need to make any changes. The main issue would be in the rare case where you were using builder plugins, which are now gone and should be replaced by derivers instead. See the change record for more details.
If you are implementing other migration scenarios, you’ll need to make the following changes to your migration modules for 8.1.2:
third_party_settings: migrate_plus: migration_group: beer
with
migration_group: beer
Previously you could omit migration_dependencies in migrations with no dependencies, but the core plugin is now a stickler for seeing an empty array. So, in this case you’ll need to add
migration_dependencies: {}
There’s still a fair amount of work being done to fill in the gaps in the core migration support (particularly for upgrades from D6/D7). Hopefully we can remove the experimental label from the migration system for Drupal 8.1.2.
In the contrib space, migrate_upgrade 8.x-2.0.beta1 (or 8.x-2.x-dev) is the release to use with Drupal 8.1.2 I will be releasing beta versions of migrate_plus and migrate_tools shortly. Once those are out, the main foci of my community time will be: