composer

Runing composer install or composer update on your Drupal 8 installation to install or update modules and themes could be sometimes frustrating because it can be very slow. Too slow in fact. But it doesn't have to be that way. Here are some tips to speed your Composer working with Drupal.

Install Prestissimo

Prestismo is a global composer plugin that that enables parallel installations and it's very fast! It can be more than 2x faster. But Prestissimo requires cURL, which may not work behind certain firewalls or proxies.

To install prestissimo follow these steps:

Today composer is the recommended approach to install (o more precisely to download)  Drupal 8. This is true for the core but also for contributed modules and themes.

So now, to start a new Drupal 8 project, we need to download it via composer and not as we did before with drush or drupal console. Of course, we'll still use drush or drupal console to install contrib modules or themes, but not for downloading them.

The main benefit of using composer is that it allows us to systematically manage a sprawling list of dependencies (and their subsidiary dependencies) and ensure that the right versions for each package are used or updated.