Reinstall

Purpose

Reinstall provides extra tools for the Drupal 8 Migrate (Migrate Plus / Migrate Tools) modules, to ease deployment from existing content, including complex hierarchies combining core entities and Paragraphs via both EntityReference and EntityReferenceRevisions.

Comparison with alternatives

Unlike Default Content and other existing similar solutions,

• it has been designed to work with large amounts of content in the context of installing/reinstalling a complete site, not just provide a limited quantity of default content.
• for that reason, it shortcuts some Migrate processes
• it only provides code support via a specific Migrate Source and Migrate process plugins for specific cases, including User, Term, and File
• actual migrations have to be written by developers building the site.

Use cases

It has been used to build a number of sites and site factories for french government agencies, France Télévisions, and companies in the Carrefour group, the latter being its main sponsor.

It is probably not a good idea for smaller, time-constrained projects, but more for Large Scale Drupal work. Just to give a rough figure, it is probably not useful for projects needing less than 10 developer.months or more than 100: experience suggests it is a best fit for the 20 to 80 developer.months range.

Contributions

This code has been published on drupal.org at the suggestion of WimLeers and Daniel Wehner, to ease its continued deployment, and hopefully so that someone will either take up its maintenance or merge some of its code/ideas in another, more general-purpose module.