acquia

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

Wait... what? If you're reading the title of this post, and are familiar with Acquia BLT, you might be wondering:

• Why are you using Acquia BLT with a project that's not running in Acquia Cloud?
• You can deploy a project built with Acquia BLT to Kubernetes?
• Don't you, like, have to use Docker instead of Drupal VM? And aren't you [Jeff Geerling] the maintainer of Drupal VM?

Well, the answers are pretty simple:

AKA "Supercharged Windows-based Drupal development"

tl;dr: Use either PhpStorm or a Samba share in the VM mounted on the host instead of using a (slow) Vagrant synced folder, and use Drupal VM 4.4's new drupal_deploy features. See the video embedded below for all the details!

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I've often mentioned that Windows users who want to build modern Drupal sites and apps are going to have a bit of a difficult time, and even wrote a long post about why this is the case (Developing with VirtualBox and Vagrant on Windows).

Windows 10 is the only release Acquia's BLT officially supports. But there are still many people who use Windows 7 and 8, and most of these people don't have control over what version of Windows they use.

Drupal VM has supported Windows 7, 8, and 10 since I started building it a few years ago (at that time I was still running Windows 7), and using a little finesse, you can actually get an entire modern BLT-based Drupal 8 project running on Windows 7 or 8, as long as you do all the right things, as will be demonstrated in this blog post.

Another day, another Acquia Developer Certification exam review (see the previous one: Certified Back end Specialist - Drupal 8, I recently took the Front End Specialist – Drupal 8 Exam, so I'll post some brief thoughts on the exam below.

Continuing along with my series of reviews of Acquia Developer Certification exams (see the previous one: Drupal 8 Site Builder Exam, I recently took the Back End Specialist – Drupal 8 Exam, so I'll post some brief thoughts on the exam below.

Acquia finally updated the full suite of Certifications—Back/Front End Specialist, Site Builder, and Developer—for Drupal 8, and the toughest exams to pass continue to be the Specialist exams. This exam, like the Drupal 7 version of the exam, requires a deeper knowledge of Drupal's core APIs, layout techniques, Plugin system, debugging, security, and even some esoteric things like basic webserver configuration!

Another year, another Acquia Certification exam... (wait—I think I've said that before).

The latest of the updated Acquia Certification Exams is the Acquia Certified Drupal 8 Site Builder. It's meant for the average Drupal site builder to test and evaluate familiarity with building websites using Drupal 8, and it's the same as all the previous exams in style: a series of 40 questions posed in the conversational manner, with answers you would provide if you were telling a project manager or site owner how you would implement a feature.

Update 2017-02-14: BLT now includes a much simpler method of upgrading the VM (provided you only override VM settings in files separate from the box/config.yml file):

# Delete the entire VM and remove config.
blt vm:nuke

# Rebuild the VM with the latest recommended version and config.
blt vm

Limiting the amount of surprises you get when developing a large-scale Drupal project is always a good thing. And to that end, Acquia's BLT (Build and Launch Tools) wisely chooses to leave Drupal VM alone when updating BLT itself. Updates to Drupal VM can and should be done independently of install profile and development and deployment tooling.

Any time there are major new versions of software, some of the tooling surrounding the software requires tweaks before everything works like it used to, or as it's documented. Since Drupal 8 and Drush 8 are both relatively young, I expect some growing pains here and there.

One problem I ran into lately was quite a head-scratcher: On Acquia Cloud, I had a cloud hook set up that was supposed to do the following after code deployments:

This code (well, with fra -y instead of cim) works fine for some Drupal 7 sites I work on in Acquia Cloud, but it seems that database updates were detected but never run, and configuration changes were detected but never made... it took a little time to see what was happening, but I eventually figured it out.

The tl;dr fix?

Another year, another Acquia Certification exam...

I'm at DrupalCon New Orleans, the first North American DrupalCon since the release of Drupal 8. In addition, this is the first DrupalCon where the Acquia Certified Developer - Drupal 8 Exam is being offered, so I decided to swing by the certification center (it's on the 3rd floor of the convention center, in case you want to take any of the certification exams this week!) and take it.