drupal 8

During some migration operations on a Drupal 8 site, I needed to make an HTTP request that took > 30 seconds to return all the data... and when I ran the migration, I'd end up with exceptions like:

The solution, it turns out, is pretty simple! Drupal's \Drupal\Core\Http\ClientFactory is the default way that plugins like Migrate's HTTP fetching plugin get a Guzzle client to make HTTP requests (though you could swap things out if you want via services.yml), and in the code for that factory, there's a line after the defaults (where the 'timeout' => 30 is defined) like:

File this one under the 'it's obvious, but only after you've done it' category—I needed to attach a CSS library to a view in Drupal 8 via a custom module so that, wherever the view displayed on the site, the custom CSS file from my module was attached. The process for CSS and JS libraries is pretty much identical, but here's how I added a CSS file as a library, and made sure it was attached to my view:

Add the CSS file as a library

In Drupal 8, drupal_add_css(), drupal_add_js(), and drupal_add_library() were removed (for various reasons), and now, to attach CSS or JS assets to views, nodes, etc., you need to use Drupal's #attached functionality to 'attach' assets (like CSS and JS) to rendered elements on the page.

In my custom module (custom.module) or custom theme (custom.theme), I added the CSS file css/custom_view.css:

In Drupal 8, many small things have changed, but my willingness to quickly hack something out in a few lines of code/config instead of installing a relatively large module to do the same thing hasn't :-)

I needed to add a checkbox to control whether the page title should be visible in the rendered page for a certain content type on a Drupal 8 site, and there are a few different ways you can do this (please suggest alternatives—especially if they're more elegant!), but I chose to do the following:

1. Add a 'Display Title' boolean field (checkbox, using the field label as the title, and setting off to 0 and on to 1 in the field settings) to the content type (page in this example).

   

Today I needed to migrate a URL/Link into a Drupal 8 site, and I was scratching my head over how to migrate it so there were distinct values for the URL (the actual link) and the Label (the 'title' that displays to end users and is clickable). Drupal 8's Link field type allows you to set a URL in addition to an optional (or required) label, but by default, if you just migrate the URL, the label will be blank.

I first set up the migration config like so:

And source_url was defined in the migration's source.fields configuration.

In my case, the source data didn't have a label, but I wanted to set a default label so the Drupal 8 site could display that as the clickable link (instead of an ugly long URL). To do that, it's similar to migrating a formatted text field, where you can migrate individual components of the field using the syntax [field_name]/[component]. In a Link field's case, it looks like:

On a recent project, there was a Migration run that took a very long time, and I couldn't pinpoint why; there were multiple migrations, and none of the others took very long at all (usually processing at least hundreds if not thousands of nodes per minute). In Drupal 7, if you enabled the XHProf module, then you'd get a checkbox on the configuration page that would turn on profiling for all page requests and Drush commands.

In Drupal 8, the XHProf module was completely rewritten, and as a side effect, the Drush/CLI profiling functionality is not yet present (see: Profile drush/CLI with XHProf in Drupal 8).

Since I don't have the time right now to help figure out how to get things working through the official XHProf module, I decided to use a 'poor man's profiling' method to profile a Migration run:

After a few months of testing, I'm happy to announce Hosted Apache Solr now supports Search API Solr with Drupal 8! Both Search API and Search API Solr have been getting closer to stable releases, and more people have been requesting Drupal 8 search cores, so I decided to finish testing and updating support guides this weekend.

Drupal VM is one of the most flexible and powerful local development environments for Drupal, but one the main goals of the project is to build a fully-functional Drupal 8 site quickly and easily without doing much setup work. The ideal would be to install Vagrant, clone or download the project, then run vagrant up. A few minutes later, you'd have a Drupal 8 site ready for hacking on!

In the past, you always had to do a couple extra steps in between, configuring a drupal.make.yml file and a config.yml file. Recently, thanks in huge part to Oskar Schöldström's herculean efforts, we achieved that ideal by switching from defaulting to a Drush make-based workflow to a Composer-based workflow (this will come in the 3.1.0 release, very soon!). But it wasn't without trial and tribulation!

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 field trip for the Pi Dramble—my 5-Raspberry-Pi cluster! I presented a session titled Highly available Drupal on a Raspberry Pi Cluster at php[tek] 2016, which just so happens to have moved to my hometown, St. Louis, MO this year!

For this presentation, I remembered to record the audio using a lav mic plugged into my iPhone, as well as iShowU to record what was on my screen. Sadly, I didn't have a secondary camera to capture the Pi Dramble itself, but you can glance at all the other 'Let's build a Pi Cluster' videos if you want to see it in action!

Here's a video recording of the presentation:

Drupal VM 3.0.0 "The Light Sailer" was just released, and you can grab it from the Drupal VM website now. We spent a lot of time during DrupalCon New Orleans sprinting on Drupal VM, fixing bugs, and updating ALL THE THINGS to make sure this release solves a lot of pain points for individuals and teams who need a great local development environment.

Let's get right into why this is the best release of Drupal VM EVER!

The fastest and most modern environment

Drupal VM now defaults to Ubuntu 16.04 (which was just released in late April), running MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7. This means you're getting the fastest, most reliable, and most modern development environment for your Drupal 8 projects.