php

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be delivering two sessions at php[tek] this year:

• Highly-available Drupal on a Raspberry Pi Cluster
• ProTips for Staying Sane while Working from Home

Both topics are near and dear to me, as I've had more time to refine the Ansible roles and performance of Drupal 8 on a Raspberry Pi (see Drupal Pi and the Raspberry Pi Dramble website for more info), and I've also been spending some time lately optimizing my WFH environment (the nice cave-like office in my basement, where I spend the majority of my waking hours!).

tl;dr: Drupal VM 2.2.0 'Wormhole' was released today, and it adds even more features for local dev!

Over the past few months, I've been working towards a more reliable release cadence for Drupal VM, and I've targeted one or two large features, a number of small improvements, and as many bugfixes as I have time to review. The community surrounding Drupal VM's development has been amazing; in the past few months I've noticed:

[Multiple updates: I've added results for concurrencies of 1 and 10, results on bare metal vs. VMware instances, tested Drupal 8 vs Drupal 7 vs Wordpress 4.4, and I've also retested every single benchmark at least twice! Please make sure you're read through the entire post prior to contesting these benchmark results!]

tl;dr: Always test your own application, and trust, but verify every benchmark you see. PHP 7 is actually faster than HHVM in many cases, neck-in-neck in others, and slightly slower in others. Both PHP 7 and HHVM blow PHP ≤ 5.6 out of the water.

Skip to benchmark results:

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:

The Drupal community uses IRC extensively for collaboration and community building. A permanent and ever-helpful fixture of the official #drupal-* IRC channels, and in the Drupal community itself, is the humble Druplicon bot. Druplicon is a Drupal-based IRC bot that was created in 2005, and is still going strong as part of the Bot module for Drupal.

Bots like Druplicon do a lot of nice things—they can remind people of things after they were away for a while, they can store facts, track karma, throw people virtual beers, store and retrieve helpful facts, and relay important information. For example, when a build fails in Jenkins, a bot can post a message in IRC. Similarly, if a server goes down, or is under heavy load, the bot could post a message.

2014 is going to be a big year for Drupal. I spent a lot of 2013 sprucing up services like Hosted Apache Solr and Server Check.in (both running on Drupal 7 currently), and porting some of my Drupal projects to Drupal 8.

So far I've made great progress on Honeypot and Wysiwyg Linebreaks, which I started migrating a while back. Both modules work and pass all tests on Drupal's current dev/alpha release, and I plan on following through with the D8CX pledges I made months ago.

tl;dr: Get the Vagrant profile for Drupal/PHP Continuous Integration Server from GitHub, and create a new VM (see the README on the GitHub project page). You now have a full-fledged Jenkins/Phing/SonarQube server for PHP/Drupal CI.

In this post, I'm going to explain how Jenkins, Phing and SonarQube can help you with your Drupal (or hany PHP-based project) deployments and code quality, and walk you through installing and configuring them to work with your codebase. Bear with me... it's a long post!

Code Deployment

If you manage more than one environment (say, a development server, a testing/staging server, and a live production server), you've probably had to deal with the frustration of deploying changes to your code to these servers.

In the old days, people used FTP and manually copied files from environment to environment. Then FTP clients became smarter, and allowed somewhat-intelligent file synchronization. Then, when version control software became the norm, people would use CVS, SVN, or more recently Git, to push or check out code to different servers.

All the aforementioned deployment methods involved a lot of manual labor, usually involving an FTP client or an SSH session. Modern server management tools like Ansible can help when there are more complicated environments, but wouldn't everything be much simpler if there were an easy way to deploy code to specific environments, especially if these deployments could be automated to either run on a schedule or whenever someone commits something to a particular branch?

Enter Jenkins. Jenkins is your deployment assistant on steroids. Jenkins works with a wide variety of tools, programming languages and systems, and allows the automation (or radical simplification) of tasks surrounding code changes and deployments.

In my particular case, I use a dedicated Jenkins server to monitor a specific repository, and when there are commits to a development branch, Jenkins checks out that branch from Git, runs some PHP code analysis tools on the codebase using Phing, archives the code and other assets in a .tar.gz file, then deploys the code to a development server and runs some drush commands to complete the deployment.

Static Code Analysis / Code Review

If you're a solo developer, and you're the only one planning on ever touching the code you write, you can use whatever coding standards you want—spacing, variable naming, file structure, class layout, etc. don't really matter.

But if you ever plan on sharing your code with others (as a contributed theme or module), or if you need to work on a shared codebase, or if there's ever a possibility you will pass on your code to a new developer, it's a good idea to follow coding standards and write good code that doesn't contain too many WTFs/min.