Document how to use a different web-root instead of 'web'

[weitzman]

Acquia Cloud requires Drupal in a subdir named 'docroot' but this project uses 'web'. The 'web' name is used in scripts in addition to composer.json. Is there some better solution for changing this than find/replace? Would be good to document this somewhere (I volunteer).

[deviantintegral]

I put a symlink from web to docroot in the project repository, and then ignored docroot from code indexing in PHPStorm. I'm not sure if Acquia lets you serve from a symlink, but I imagine you could rename web to docroot, and then make web the symlink.

[greg-1-anderson]

I use 'drupal' in pantheon-systems/example-drupal7-circle-composer, and I have also seen htdocs and code.

I'd like to use the same directory name in my project as is used here. It doesn't matter to me very much which one we use; if I'm going to have to rename my root directory anyway, 'docroot' is as good of a choice as any.

If we can agree that it makes sense to standardize on docroot, I'll make a PR here to do it, and convert my project over as well.

[webflo]

I would go with web. Many people use the template already for D7 and D8. web is default in https://github.com/symfony/symfony-standard as well.

[greg-1-anderson]

Okay, I will switch to web to follow the standard here and in symfony.

[webflo]

@weitzman Maybe we can revisit this issue and provide a template without the scaffolding files after #77 went in.

[greg-1-anderson]

So, it turns out that I have to use code when using Drupal 8 on Pantheon. This limitation should not be around forever; once the restriction is lifted, I'll switch back to web in my fork.

When using drupal-composer/drupal-scaffold, it is very easy to change the location of the Drupal root--and is getting easier. It might be nice to make scripts/composer/post-install.sh a function of drupal-scaffold. If we also defined the placeholder folders such as modules/contrib in composer.json, and had drupal-scaffold create those as well, then we could probably remove the web directly altogether.

[RoSk0]

Is it possible the directory name to be configurable?

[greg-1-anderson]

If we removed the web directory, then the only references to the document root would be in the composer.json file and the post-install script. We might be able to have post-install read composer.json and pick up the location of the document root by checking the location of drupal/core; however, there are multiple references to the document root in the composer.json file. You could maybe factor those out to a single reference by adding variable replacement support to composer/installers, but I don't know if such an enhancement would be welcome or not.

[greg-1-anderson]

The latest version of #77 makes it pretty easy to change the directory name on the fly. There are still a couple of files where it needs to be changed. Unfortunately, the composer command-line tool will not divulge the installation location of a component. You can do it from a custom installer, but, as I mentioned in #77, I recommended that post-install.sh should be kept a shell script so that it is easier for folks to customize.

[greg-1-anderson]

#77 / #105 have been merged, so relocating the docroot from web to something else now requires modification of only a few files:

1. composer.json (several locations)
2. .gitignore (several locations)
3. post-install.sh (only DOCROOT variable at top of the script)

We could in principal read DOCROOT from composer.json in post-install.sh, but it would still be necessary to make multiple changes to composer.json and .gitignore, so perhaps this is not worthwhile.

Perhaps we should leave this as a customization to be done by the end user?

[deviantintegral]

This feels like there's enough site-specific components to this that trying to automate more probably isn't worth the effort. Let's just make this a task to document the steps above? So far they're working fine for me.

[weitzman]

Yes, a docs PR sounds about right. Symlink is simplest solution for many.

[gambry]

relocating the docroot from web to something else now requires modification of only a few files:

composer.json (several locations)
.gitignore (several locations)
post-install.sh (only DOCROOT variable at top of the script)

After #128 now files are:

• composer.json (several locations)
• .gitignore (several locations)
• scripts/composer/ScriptHandler.php

But as @weitzman is suggesting a symlink is still the simplest solution ("web" -> "any" or "any" -> "web").