Drupal quick tip: Ignore custom modules when checking for updates

When you are doing Drupal development and have complex deployment scenarios (I blogged about that on the Namics blog [German]), it’s not unusual to have several modules containing custom functionality, as well as several Features modules. In a large site this can quickly become a dozen or more, depending on the aggregation and splitting of various functionality across modules. All of those Features will be checked for updates, every time the Update status module is run and will not find any releases for it.

Now that’s annoying and helpful Stack Overflow/Drupal Answers people have already found the hook you need to fix it. Of course there is a hook for that. The code snippet taken from there is reproduced below. I amended it to also contain a second hook, which then also excludes these modules from being checked when translations are checked by the Localization update module.

function mymodule_update_projects_alter(&$projects) {
  $blacklist = array(
    'collection_feature',
    //etc.
  );

  foreach ($blacklist as $module) {
    unset($projects[$module]);
  }
}

function mymodule_l10n_update_projects_alter(&$projects) {
  mymodule_update_projects_alter($projects);
}