Drupal 8 Configuration Management

In Drupal 7, users who struggled to set up an effective system of moving from development to live sites. If you changed your settings on a development site, it was often difficult to move those to your live site. The Configuration Management improvements in Drupal 8 are designed to make that much easier. Configuration Management was one of several major initiatives for Drupal 8.

Configuration Management is a new Drupal core system that allows database configuration to be exported to YML files. This makes the process of moving configuration settings from one environment to another much easier than in previous versions of Drupal. For example, if you make a new View page in the development environment and want to deploy it to the testing environment, it’s a matter of exporting the configuration, committing it to version control (git), and deploying/importing it on the other environment.

Managing Your Site's Configuration

- In a multi-tier environment, with live, local, and often more site instances, all instances of the same site will operate with the same configuration.
- Configuration changes will not be made directly on the live site, but will first be made in a development instance of the site and later be deployed to the live site via configuration management.

Configuration Management to recreate a live site and as a development site, in 5 simple steps
- Install Drupal 8. We will call this site "Live."
- Make a copy of this site. We'll call this "Development". Make the copy by using the same source code, the files directory and a database dump of the Live site imported on Development.
- Using the Configuration Management interface, export the full Development site configuration. This will create a compressed file called config.tar.gz.
- On the Live site, use the Configuration Management interface to navigate to and import the compressed file.
- After upload, review the changes (as in the image below) and click the "Import all" button.

More Information can be found here. https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/configuration-management