CLI in Core Initiative Update #1

Last week we kicked off the initiative with a synchronous meeting using video chat followed up by creating Slack threads to continue the conversation for the week. This time was set to be friendly for Americas and Europe/Africa to start with based on discussions at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, but we talked about the best strategy to continue meetings at different times.

Before the meeting, I swapped into developer mode and fixed the test failures in package_manager after a lot of debugging to figure out how it was creating directories and running composer. That’s right, we’re green!

My initial thought was to have 2 meetings in a 24-hour period starting with the Americas/Europe/Africa sychronously, continue into Slack threads asynchronously, and then finish with a more Oceania/Asia friendly synchronous meeting. However we came to the consensus of planning one week at one time slot and the following week at the other time slot, which would technically be the next day.

We agreed we did need to create more issues to track items, but we are focused on getting 3463474: CLI entry point in Drupal Core completed first. Additionally there is a need to track meeting agenda from synchronous and asynchronous back into drupal.org issues. We have not created a meeting issue for last week yet. I am always afraid of creating more issues that generate noise that won’t necessarily have a comment chain on them. This is happening to me when I go to search for a string on drupal.org and I end up finding that same string in 10 meeting issues that I myself created, but not finding the documentation page that I was actually searching for.

We came to the consensus that we wanted to get this Reviewed & Tested by the Community (RTBC) status in the next week or so to give the core committer and release team time to re-review the issue. That way we can maybe fix it back up again to RTBC and merged prior to Drupal Dev Days later this month.

We also reduced the scope of the initiative to not require Drush formatters, which would probably complicate things.

We had a lot of participation and collaboration to work on tasks throughout the week. Jack Franks volunteered to write API documentation, which he completed the other day. Moshe agreed to continue to work through longwave’s and my review comments, which we are almost through. And then afterward, mott came in and finished the dex renaming by renaming the test module and tests. bircher provided feedback about it still being helpful to post meeting issues. Thomas is tracking commands and decisions in the spreadsheet. tekNorah organized the video conference and got us meeting notes.

There are two pending items for the issue to be initially RTBC:

1. Change the system:example command to system:version instead and print out the current Drupal version rather than the current date/time. The Command documentation block also needs to be cleaned up.
2. Address all other review items.
3. Confirm moshe’s explanation for longwave’s questions are suitable.
4. Consider my suggestion in TemplateProjectTestBase.
5. ConsoleCompilerPass has some documentation that refers to Symfony 7.4, and there’s a question about documenting why we can't use Symfony’s class.
6. Consider updating the API documentation from referencing php core/scripts/drupal to using vendor/bin/drupal because that’s the best way to run it after merging.
7. Address all of the other suggestions by longwave.
8. Maybe improve the testing instructions.

Anyway, I am really excited for tomorrow’s synchronous initiative meeting at 22:00 UTC on 2026.04.08 (2026.04.09 in most of Oceania and Asia).

I used the following Slack template to start with:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the :sparkle: CLI in Core Initiative :sparkle: Meeting! :calendar: This meeting:➤ Usually happens weekly either at Wednesday 14:00 UTC or Wednesday 22:00 UTC.➤ Will start synchronously for 30 minutes with an open agenda.➤ Will then switch to threads to continue discussions.➤ Please comment on the roll call thread throughout the day.