This is a follow-up to my DrupalCon Pittsburgh talk from a year prior and the shorter DrupalCon Lille talk. It provides a ~15 minute overview of the status nor the progress, but dedicates the majority to 5 (!!!) live demos to show how to start using config validation today:

1. use Config Inspector to find which config is still missing validation constraints, add it, and observe it catching invalid data — by adding a few lines of YAML!
2. adding validation constraints to config schema, and observing them working and being picked up by Config Inspector
3. update existing config forms to use validation constraints, using the new #config_target
4. modifying configuration via JSON:API!
5. last but not least: a Guaranteed-to-Work Recipe, created from scratch, and it refusing to get applied if it results in invalid configuration

This is a follow-up to my DrupalCon Pittsburgh talk. It does not provide an overview of the status nor the progress, but instead it’s hands-on, with 2 live demos to help attendees:

1. use Config Inspector to find which config is still missing validation constraints, add it, and observe it catching invalid data — by adding 3 lines of YAML!
2. update existing config forms to use validation constraints, including tweaking the validation error message — by adding 6 lines of YAML and copy/pasting 5 lines of PHP!

Each in less than 5 minutes, including the explanation!

In other words: everybody walked out ready to contribute to the DrupalCon sprints on the next day, or to update their own modules.

I’m honored to say that this was voted the 8th most interesting session at DrupalCon Lille!

As has become a tradition since DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019, all Drupal core initiatives with leads attending DrupalCon Lille took part in a PechaKucha-style keynote format. Despite not leading any initiative right now, I was asked to present the status & progress of the work on Config Validation that I together with a handful of others have been doing in the past few months.

Drupal 8 shipped with many exciting new concepts, including “configuration”, “configuration and content entities”, “validation constraints” and “API-First”.

The missing link between these has always been the inability to modify configuration through Drupal’s REST or JSON:API. Because only content entities have validation constraints.

This has been the #1 blocker to the Drupal (JS) Admin UI initiative: validation of configuration unfortunately (but understandably) still is hardcoded in the PHP-based form logic.

But … in the background, the foundation was laid during the Drupal 8 cycle to validate configuration. In fact, one contrib module has been doing it since 3 years before this DrupalCon is taking place — no core hacks required.

Drupal 10’s CKEditor 5 module is the first time that Drupal core is using validation constraints instead of form-based validation logic!

Not only does this allow modifying configuration through APIs, it also allows us to eliminate subtle configuration errors that go unnoticed, and thus make Drupal more reliable in general!

It also paves the path for the Recipes Initiative as well as the many configuration management-related modules to become much more reliable.