The workflow for patching Drupal modules can be a bit obtuse if you do everything by hand, but with composer it’s easy!
I manage all contributed modules with composer, so an example composer.json might look like this:
{
"name": "example",
"description": "Drupal 8 Example",
"type": "project",
"minimum-stability": "dev",
"prefer-stable": true,
"repositories": [
{
"type":"composer",
"url":"https://packages.drupal.org/8"
}
],
"require": {
"cweagans/composer-patches": "^1.6",
"composer/installers": "^1.6",
"drupal-composer/drupal-scaffold": "^2.5",
"drupal/core": "^8.6",
"drush/drush": "^9.5",
"drupal/health_check": "^1.0",
"drupal/redis": "^1.1",
"drupal/twig_tweak": "^2.1"
},
"scripts": {
"drupal-scaffold": "DrupalComposer\\DrupalScaffold\\Plugin::scaffold"
},
"extra" : {
"installer-paths": {
"docroot/core": ["type:drupal-core"],
"docroot/libraries/{$name}": ["type:drupal-library"],
"docroot/modules/contrib/{$name}": ["type:drupal-module"],
"docroot/themes/contrib/{$name}": ["type:drupal-theme"]
}
}
}
This will put all of my Drupal modules into docroot/modules/contrib (relative to my composer.json).
But say I need to patch twig_tweak, for example. I would need to clone the git repo and check it out at whatever the most recent dev version is.
To do that with composer, you can run
composer require drupal/twig_tweak --prefer-source
If you’ve already installed twig_tweak, you’ll have to remove it first (rm -rf docroot/modules/contrib/twig_tweak)
Now you’ll have the module installed with the .git folder so you can track any changes you need to make. If you go into the module’s directory (cd docroot/modules/contrib/twig_tweak) and run git branch -v you can see that it also pulls info for the dev branch, assuming you’re on the main branch.
You can now make your adjustments, and create a patch by running git diff > name-of-patch.patch.
If for some reason your patch is specific to your use case and you don’t need/want to push it upstream somewhere, you can store this .patch file locally and add it to your composer but use a relative path. I usually put custom patches in ./patches, so an example patch would add this to my composer.json inside the ‘extras’ object:
"patches": {
"drupal/twig_tweak": {
"Fix something specific to my use case": "./patches/twig_tweak.patch"
}
}
Patches in composer this way require the cweagans/composer-patches package.
As a final note, in the near future Drupal is partnering with Gitlab to revamp contribution workflows and importantly adding merge requests. Most likely this workflow will be a little bit different when patch-based contribution is swapped for merge requests.