Drupalaton in Hungary last weekend gave the opportunity for a 90 minutes workshop about Configuration Management (CMI) and how it changes a Drupal developers work flow with the coming Drupal 8.

CMI allows you to have the whole site configuration under control and that is a great improvement. But it also comes with its pitfalls. Developers have to be more vigilant when sharing configuration with each other: mindless exporting configuration may override the configuration shared by others, mindless importing may override one's own work and forgetting to import merged configuration leads to ignoring the work of your co-developers at a later stage.

CMI, while it is much more awesome than anything we have in Drupal 7, is also much more unforgiving. So it would be all too easy to not use it properly and what it was designed for and then wonder why you can't have nice things.

Fortunately, a methodical git workflow can help recover from mistakes (except importing configuration before exporting it first). So don't forget the order of the steps:

1. config export
2. git commit
3. git merge
4. config import

And do it often to keep the merges and failures simple and easy to resolve.

Please find the full Drupalaton 2015 workshop slides attached below.