drupal vm

I just released Drupal VM 6.0.0 today, and it is the best version of Drupal VM yet!

The main goals for this new version are stability and compatibility.

Originally I was going to drop some features that are helpful for people running older Drupal 7 sites, but since Drupal 7's End of Life was just extended into 2022, I decided to extend the support for some features like Drush make files, as many users of Drupal VM still maintain Drupal 7 sites, or use Drupal VM to test the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9.

The default PHP version was upgraded from PHP 7.2 to 7.4 in Drupal VM 6, and this new version should work great with almost any Drupal 7, 8, or 9 website (in fact, PHP 7.3 is Drupal 9's minimum requirement!).

Drupal VM 5.1.0 was just released (release name Recognizer), and the main feature is PHP 7.4 support; you can now begin running and testing your Drupal sites under PHP 7.4 to check for any incompatibilities.

PHP 7.4 includes some new features like typed properties, arrow functions, and opcache preloading which could help with certain types of code or site deployments (I'm interested to see if opcache preloading could help the startup time of Drupal inside container environments like Kubernetes!).

It's been five years since Drupal VM's first release, and to celebrate, it's time to release Drupal VM 5.0 "Flynn Lives"! This update is not a major architectural shift, but instead, a new major version that updates many defaults to use the latest versions of the base VM OS and application software. Some of the new default versions include:

• Ubuntu 18.04 'Bionic' LTS (was Ubuntu 16.04)
• PHP 7.2 (was PHP 7.1)
• Node.js 10.x (was Node.js 6.x)

See the full release notes here: Drupal VM 5.0.0 "Flynn Lives"

There are also a number of other small improvements (as always), and ever-increasing test coverage for all the Ansible roles that power Drupal VM. And in the Drupal VM 4.x release lifecycle, a new official pre-baked Drupal VM base box was added, the geerlingguy/drupal-vm Vagrant base box. Using that base box can speed up new VM builds by 50% or more!

Update: The results are available for viewing in our presentation slides: download the 2019 Drupal Local Development presentation (PDF). There is also a video of the survey results presentation from DrupalCon Seattle.

It's that time of year again! Leading up to DrupalCon Seattle, Chris Urban and I are working on a presentation on Local Development environments for Drupal, and we have just opened up the 2019 Drupal Local Development Survey.

Local development environment usage results from 2018's survey.

At DrupalCon Nashville 2018, I became deeply interested in the realm of first-time Drupal experiences, specifically around technical evaluation, and how people would get their feet wet with Drupal. There were two great BoFs related to the topic which I attended, and which I hope will bear some fruits over the next year in making Drupal easier for newcomers:

• Improving Drupal's Evaluator experience
• An official Drupal local development environment?

There are a number of different tools people can use to run a new Drupal installation, but documentation and ease of use for beginners is all over the place. The intention of this project is to highlight the most stable, simple, and popular ways to get a Drupal site installed and running for testing or site building, and measure a few benchmarks to help determine which one(s) might be best for Drupal newcomers.

The Drupal community has been on an interesting journey since the launch of Drupal 8 in 2015. In the past three years, as the community has started to get its sea legs 'off the island' (using tools, libraries, and techniques used widely in the general PHP community), there have been growing pains.

One area where the pains have been (and sometimes still are) highly visible is in how Drupal and Composer work together. I've written posts like Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows in the past, and while in some ways that's still the case, we as a community are getting closer and closer to a nirvana with modern Drupal site building and project management.

For example, in preparing a hands-on portion of my and Matthew Grasmick's upcoming DrupalCon Nashville lab session on Composer and Drupal, I found that we're already to the point where you can go from literally zero to a fully functional and complete Drupal site codebase—along with a functional local development environment—in about 10 or 15 minutes:

MidCamp 2018 wrapped up with a bang today, as there was another year full of great training, sessions, and my favorite aspect, the 'hallway track' (where you go around and network between and during some sessions with tons of excellent Drupalists from the Midwest and around the country).

This year, I presented two sessions; one a co-presentation with Chris Urban titled Local Dev Environments for Dummies, the other a solo presentation titled Jenkins or: How I learned to stop worrying and love automation.

Embedded below are the video recordings of the sessions (recorded as always by the excellent Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop!):

tl;dr: Go complete the Drupal Local Development Survey, and we'll present the results (among other things) at MidCamp in a couple weeks!

Local development for Drupal is a subject I've invested a lot of time into. At the start of my Drupal journey, I used to use MAMP, then MAMP Pro, then a native *AMP installation. Then when I learned about Vagrant I started building Vagrant-based environments with shell scripts. Then I learned Ansible and started using Vagrant and Ansible. And then I learned Docker and used Ansible, Docker, and sometimes Vagrant!

Everyone's journey is different—but one thing most of us can agree on is: it ain't easy finding a way to run Drupal on your local workstation if you've never done it before.

Should you use MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP? Should you use Acquia Dev Desktop? Should you use Docker or Vagrant and build your own environment? Should you use a packaged solution like Drupal VM or Lando? And then how will you manage your codebase? How will you build a theme?

tl;dr: Drupal VM 4.8.0 was just released, and it uses Drush 9 and Drush Launcher to usher in a new era of Drush integration!

Drush has been Drupal's stable sidekick for many years; even as Drupal core has seen major architectural changes from versions 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7, and 7 to 8, Drush itself has continued to maintain an extremely stable core set of APIs and integrations for pretty much all the time I've been using it.

New Drush version, new Drush website!

Drupal VM has been hitting its stride this year; after adding experimental Docker support in 4.5, Docker usage has been refined in 4.6 (with a more stable and useful drupal-vm Docker image, along with a few other things: