Verifying your Drupal site’s configuration against changes from dependency updates

Previously, I wrote about leveraging Dependabot to automate dependency updates for my Drupal projects. Automating dependency updates saves a lot of time. However, Drupal core or contributed modules may perform updates that modify the configuration state of your Drupal site that needs to be re-exported. A standard continuous integration pipeline that only performs code linting and tests will miss these changes. For my projects, I have a job that runs the update process for the Drupal site and fails if the configuration has been modified at runtime by these updates. This lets me know I have to perform a manual action locally to update the exported configuration.

I primarily use GitHub Actions nowadays, and this post will walk through the steps in that format. But it is easily translatable to any CI system. I’ll provide a more generic alternative example at the end.

Defining the config_verification job

First, we define the basics of the job.

jobs:
  config_verification:
    name: Verify configuration changes
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

I’m adding a MySQL service to the job so that I can install the Drupal site.

services:
      mysql:
        image: mysql:5.7
        env:
            MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD: yes
            MYSQL_DATABASE: ci
        ports:
            - 3306
        options: --health-cmd="mysqladmin ping"…