Config Sync Directory Setting Change In Drupal 9

19th August 2020 - 2 minutes read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and we will endeavour to correct.

A change that was snuck into Drupal version 8.8.0 and wasn't mentioned in the 8.8.0 change notes was a small change to the setting that controls the placement of the configuration directories. The alteration deprecated the $config_directories setting from the settings.php file and move the configuration into the $settings array. You can see the detail behind this change on the Drupal change record.

The fix for this is very easy and only needs a single line of code to change in your settings file.

Change this:

$config_directories['sync'] = '../config/sync';

To this:

$settings['config_sync_directory'] = '../config/sync';

This small change has started tripping me up since I have started to run Drupal 9 upgrades since the previous setting was only deprecated and not removed. Once you upgrade to Drupal 9 you'll immediately see a problem with the configuration directory setting not being present. This can be easily corrected by just swapping over the above variables.