Grav: GPM Plugin Freeze and Install

[MaZderMind]

When setting a Grav-Isntallation up in a Repo, it would be useful to have some way to bin/gpm freeze the currently installed Plugins into a file (like we do with the composer dependencies), so that on another machine (production, ci-system, other computer) a single bin/gpm install would install all required plugins and themes.

[rhukster]

That sounds like a cool feature. I like that idea.

[flaviocopes]

Sort of creating a .dependencies file?

[MaZderMind]

@flaviocopes yes, exactly. I'm trying to create a Grav-Site whose state is completely controlled via a git repo, so on any machine I can just git clone && composer install and have a running system.

Currently I dassed the plugins as git submodules, which is not too bad, but as you already have a package manager which is capable of installing and updating, this would be a probably small addon which would make a complete git-based system even simpler.

[rhukster]

would be cool to create a lock file that contains specific versions of files that can be used by our GPM commands.

[w00fz]

I was thinking about this and like composer and yarn do, it would be nice to get to the point where we can create a dependencies.lock file after GPM install/update that would freeze the list of plugins currently installed as well as the version they are at. Including for Grav itself.

This could help backing up and restoring a lot, as well as moving things across servers or even just putting the bare-bone instance on a git repository, without having to copy over the whole user folder.

[Perlkonig]

Is there documentation for the .dependencies file format? I'm interested in poking at this issue if nobody else is already doing so.

[flaviocopes]

I don't know about a proper documentation for it, it's a learn by example at this point.

[Perlkonig]

Time to dive into some code, then. 🏊

[amtur8]

@Perlkonig where are you with this? I'd like this as a feature as well.

[DavidOliver]

I'm new to Grav (thanks for Grav!) and was a bit surprised that nothing related to Grav plugin dependencies had been added to my Git repo after installing the admin plugin. Now I know why. :)

As a workaround and an alternative to using Git submodules, would a viable strategy be to rsync my dev installation's user/plugins directory to my production server's installation on each deploy?

[flaviocopes]

I usually install plugins from the GPM (so, no submodules) and store all the user/ folder in the site repo, so I update locally and just push to update the remote site. In this way, there is nothing to do on the remote than a simple git pull with a post-commit hook.

But I can see it useful storing the current version of the installed packages in a config file, and have a CLI command to sync a site to those versions. Also because for private plugins you don't have the GPM and you'll have a submodule in each plugin (assuming you version control them)