drupal planet

Earlier today, I gave a presentation on Ansible and Drupal 8 at MidCamp in Chicago. In the presentation, I introduced Ansible, then deployed and updated a Drupal 8 site on a cluster of 6 Raspberry Pi computers, nicknamed the Dramble.

Video from the presentation is below (sadly, slides/voice only—you can't see the actual cluster of Raspberry Pis... for that, come see me in person sometime!):

My slides from the presentation are embedded below, and I'll be posting a video of the presentation as soon as it's available.

On March 21, 2015, there was a fairly well-attended Camp Organizers BoF at MidCamp in Chicago. I took notes during the BoF and am simply publishing them here for the benefit of camp organizers in the Drupal Community. They're fairly raw, but hopefully they'll be helpful for you!

Version 0.9.3 of the Dramble—running Drupal 8 on 6 Raspberry Pis

I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid, but in the past ten or so years, mainstream computing has become more and more locked down, enclosed, lightweight, and, well, polished. I even wrote a blog post about how, nowadays, most computers are amazing. Long gone are the days when I had to worry about line voltage, IRQ settings, diagnosing bad capacitors, and replacing 40-pin cables that went bad!

But I'm always tempted back into my earlier years of more hardware-oriented hacking when I pull out one of my Raspberry Pi B+/A+ or Arduino Unos. These devices are as raw of modern computers as you can get—requiring you to actual touch the silicone chips and pins to be able to even use the devices. I've been building a temperature monitoring network that's based around a Node.js/Express app using Pis and Arduinos placed around my house. I've also been working a lot lately on a project that incorporates three of my current favorite technologies: The Raspberry Pi 2 model B (just announced earlier this month), Ansible, and Drupal!

In short, I'm building a cluster of Raspberry Pis, and designating it a 'Dramble'—a 'bramble' of Raspberry Pis running Drupal 8.

I just posted a large excerpt from Ansible for DevOps over on the Server Check.in blog: Highly-Available Infrastructure Provisioning and Configuration with Ansible. In it, I describe a simple set of playbooks that configures a highly-available infrastructure primarily for PHP-based websites and web applications, using Varnish, Apache, Memcached, and MySQL, each configured in a way optimal for high-traffic and highly-available sites.

Here's a diagram of the ultimate infrastructure being built:

It's been a well-known fact that using native VirtualBox or VMWare shared folders is a terrible idea if you're developing a Drupal site (or some other site that uses thousands of files in hundreds of folders). The most common recommendation is to switch to NFS for shared folders.

NFS shared folders are a decent solution, and using NFS does indeed speed up performance quite a bit (usually on the order of 20-50x for a file-heavy framework like Drupal!). However, it has it's downsides: it requires extra effort to get running on Windows, requires NFS support inside the VM (not all Vagrant base boxes provide support by default), and is not actually all that fast—in comparison to native filesystem performance.

I was developing a relatively large Drupal site lately, with over 200 modules enabled, meaning there were literally thousands of files and hundreds of directories that Drupal would end up scanning/including on every page request. For some reason, even simple pages like admin forms would take 2+ seconds to load, and digging into the situation with XHProf, I found a likely culprit:

Drupal 8's expanded and broadly-used Entity API extends even to Contact Forms, and recently I needed to create a contact form programmatically as part of Honeypot's test suite. Normally, you can export a contact form as part of your site configuration, then when it's imported in a different site/environment, it will be set up simply and easily.

However, if you need to create a contact form programmatically (in code, dynamically), it's a rather simple affair:

First, use Drupal's ContactForm class at the top of the file so you can use the class in your code later:

Then, create() and save() a ContactForm entity using:

In support of my mission to make local development easier and faster, I've released boxes for four of the most popular Linux distributions I use and see used for Drupal sites: CentOS 6/7 and Ubuntu 12.04/14.04.

For all the sites I maintain, I have at least a local and production environment. Some projects warrant a dev, qa, etc. as well, but for the purposes of this post, let's just assume you often run drush commands on local or development environments during development, and eventually run a similar command on production during a deployment.

What happens if, at some point, you are churning through some Drush commands, using aliases (e.g. drush @site.local break-all-the-things to break things for testing), and you accidentally enter @site.prod instead of @site.local? Or what if you were doing something potentially disastrous, like deleting a database table locally so you can test a module install file, using drush sqlq to run a query?

I recently ran into an issue where drush vset was not setting a string variable (in this case, a time period that would be used in strtotime()) correctly:

Using the --strict=0 option resulted in the variable being set to a value of "1".

After scratching my head a bit, trying different ways of escaping the string value, using single and double quotes, etc., I finally realized I could just use variable_set() with drush's php-eval command (shortcut ev):

This worked perfectly and allowed me to go make sure my time was successfully set to one day in the past.