drupal 8

We had a great discussion about how different companies and individuals are using Ansible for Drupal infrastructure management and deployments at DrupalCon LA, and I wanted to post some slides from my (short) intro to Ansible presentation here, as well as a few notes from the presentation.

The slides are below:

And video/audio from the BoF:

Notes from the BoF

If first gave an overview of the basics of Ansible, demonstrating some Ad-Hoc commands on my Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of six Raspberry Pi 2 computers running Drupal 8), then we dove headfirst into a great conversation about Ansible and Drupal.

Almost three years ago, on Feb 19, 2013, I opened the 8.x-dev branch of the Honeypot module (which helps prevent form spam on thousands of Drupal sites). These were heady times in the lifetime of the then-Drupal 8.x branch; 8.0-alpha1 wasn't released until three months later, on May 19. I made the #D8CX pledge—when Drupal 8 was released, I'd make sure there was a full, stable Honeypot release ready to go.

Little did I know it would be more than 2.5 years—and counting—before I could see that promise through to fruition!

As months turned into years, I've kept to the pledge, and eventually decided to also port a couple other modules that I use on many of my own Drupal sites, like Wysiwyg Linebreaks and Simple Mail.

Drupal.org has an excellent resource page to help you create a static archive of a Drupal site. The page references tools and techniques to take your dynamically-generated Drupal site and turn it into a static HTML site with all the right resources so you can put the site on mothballs.

From time to time, one of Midwestern Mac's hosted sites is no longer updated (e.g. LOLSaints.com), or the event for which the site was created has long since passed (e.g. the 2014 DrupalCamp STL site).

I though I'd document my own workflow for converting typical Drupal 6 and 7 sites to static HTML to be served up on a simple Apache or Nginx web server without PHP, MySQL, or any other special software, since I do a few special things to preserve the original URL alias structure, keep CSS, JS and images in order, and make sure redirections still work properly.

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.

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.

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:

Now that Drupal 8.0.0-beta1 is out, and the headless Drupal craze is in full-swing, the Drupal St. Louis meetup this month will focus on using Drupal 8 with AngularJS to build a demo pizza ordering app. (The meetup is on Thurs. Oct. 23, starting at 6:30 p.m.; see even more info in this Zero to Drupal post).

We'll be hacking away and seeing how far we can get, and hopefully we'll be able to leave with at least an MVP-quality product! I'll be at the event, mostly helping people get a Drupal 8 development environment up and running. For some, this alone will hopefully be a huge help, and maybe motivation to adopt Drupal 8 more quickly!

If you're in or around the St. Louis area, consider joining us; especially if you would like to learn something about either Drupal 8 or AngularJS!

P.S. To those who have been emailing: the rest of the Apache Solr search series is coming, it's just been postponed while I've started a new job at Acquia, and had a new baby!

I'm still recovering from an intense week of Drupal here in Austin, TX. I kicked things off by walking around the downtown area, then taking the intensive Acquia Drupal Developer Certification exam. Once the conference started, I attended a few sessions, met a few awesome Drupalists, and learned a lot. On the last day of the 'Con (the last session, in fact), I presented DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!.

I think the presentation went well, and I heard some great questions at the end which really contributed to the discussion of Ansible and Drupal deployments in general. It was a great way to finish up the official DrupalCon sessions, though it meant I was revising slides for the hundredth time during the rest of the week, instead of relaxing and enjoying DrupalCon!

Before I post a video and slides from the session, I wanted to highlight some resources for anyone who attended (or didn't attend) DrupalCon Austin:

• Extended sprints are still going on—join up and help make Drupal better!
• All the session videos are available on the Drupal Association's YouTube Channel. The videos are also embedded in each session's page on the Austin 2014 website. Here's a list of all the sessions.
• Check out future DrupalCon info: DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014, DrupalCon Latin America 2015, and DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015.
• If you attended the Palantir-sponsored Trivia Night, here are all the teams' final scores (my table got 9th, with 3 DrupalCon first-timers!).

Below is the video and slides from the DevOps for Humans presentation. Please let me know what you think!