drupal

(It's not too late to submit a session—and register for DrupalCamp soon, since early bird pricing ends on August 1!)

The organizers behind DrupalCamp St. Louis 2017 are happy to announce we have a speaker scheduled to present the Keynote, Adam Bergstein—Associate Director of Engineering at CivicActions!

Adam's Keynote is titled "Restoring Our Lost Imagination", and here's a short summary:

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:

Drupal VM has used Vagrant and (usually) VirtualBox to run Drupal infrastructure locally since its inception. But ever since Docker became 'the hot new thing' in infrastructure tooling, I've been asked when Drupal VM will convert to using Docker.

The answer to that question is a bit nuanced; Drupal VM has been using Docker to run its own integration tests for over a year (that's how I run tests on seven different OSes using Travis CI). And technically, Drupal VM's core components have always been able to run inside Docker containers (most of them use Docker-based integration tests as well).

But Docker usage was always an undocumented and unsupported feature of Drupal VM. But no longer—with 4.5.0, Drupal VM now supports Docker as an experimental alternative to Vagrant + VirtualBox, and you can use Drupal VM with Docker in one of two ways:

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2017 will be held September 22-23, 2017, in St. Louis, Missouri. This will be our fourth year hosting a DrupalCamp, and we're one of the best camps for new presenters!

If you did something amazing with Drupal, if you're an aspiring themer, site builder, or developer, or if you are working on making the web a better place, we'd love for you to submit a session. Session submissions are due by August 1.

More and more sites are being built in Drupal 8 (over 160,000 as of DrupalCon Baltimore 2017!). As developers determine best practices for Drupal 8 site builds and deployment, they need to come to terms with Composer. In one of the most visible signs that Drupal is 'off the island', many modules are now requiring developers to have at least a fundamental grasp of Composer and dependency management.

But even more than that, many developers now use Composer in place of manual dependency management or a simpler tools like Drush Make files.

With these major changes comes some growing pains. Seeing these pains on a daily basis, I wrote Tips for Managing Drupal 8 projects with Composer to highlight some best practices and tricks for making Composer more powerful and helpful.

But many developers still wrestle with Composer, and mourn the fact that deployments aren't as simple as dragging zip files and tarballs around between servers, or checking everything into a Git repository and doing a git push. For example:

• If I manage my codebase with Composer and follow Composer's own recommendation—don't commit dependencies in my vendor directory, what's the best way to actually deploy my codebase? Should I run composer install on my production web server? What about shared hosting where I might not have command line access at all?
• Many modules (like Webform) require dependencies to be installed in a libraries folder in the docroot. How can I add front end dependencies via Composer in custom locations outside of the vendor directory?

And on and on.

Over 3,000 community members attended DrupalCon Baltimore 2017.
(Photo by Michael Cannon)

During a BoF I led at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017 (Managing Drupal sites with Composer), we identified over 20 common pain points people are having with Composer, and for many of them, we discussed ways to overcome the problems. However, there are still a few open questions, or problems which could be solved in a number of different ways (some better than others).

I've taken all my notes from the BoF, and organized them into a series of problems (questions) and answers below. Please leave follow-up comments below this post if you have any other thoughts or ideas, or if something is not clear yet!

I presented Just Keep Swimming! Or, how not to drown in your open source project at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017, as part of the Being Human track. Below is a text summary of the presentation (along with the associated slides).

Here's a video of the presentation; scroll past it to read through a transcript and slides:

And the slides/transcript:

Update: The BoF has come and passed... and I put up a comprehensive summary of the session here: Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 25), I'm leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at DrupalCon Baltimore titled Managing Drupal sites with Composer (3:45 - 4:45 p.m. in room 305).

I've built four Drupal 8 websites now, and for each site, I have battle scars from working with Composer (read my Tips for Managing Drupal 8 projects with Composer). Even some of the tools that I use alongside composer—for project scaffolding, managing dependencies, patching things, etc.—have changed quite a bit over the past year.

When Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, now seemingly rebranded as Bash on ubuntu on Windows, I was excited at the possibility of having Drupal VM (and other similarly command-line-friendly open source projects) work better in a Windows environment. But unfortunately, the Anniversary update's version of WSL/Ubuntu Bash was half-baked, and there were a lot of little issues trying to get anything cohesive done between the Windows and Ubuntu Bash environments (even with cbwin).

Then, a year or so later, Microsoft finally announced that tons of improvements (including upgrading Ubuntu in the WSL from 14.04 to 16.04!) would be included in the 'Creators Update' to Windows 10, dropping tomorrow, April 11.

MidCamp is one of my favorite Drupal events—it hits the sweet spot (at least for me) in terms of diversity, topics, and camp size. I was ecstatic when one of my session submissions was accepted, and just finished presenting Developing for Drupal 8 with Drupal VM.

You can see slides from the presentation here: Drupal VM for Drupal 8 Development, but without the full video there are a lot of gaps (especially on slides where there's just a giant emoji!). Luckily, Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop is hard at work recording all the sessions and posting them to YouTube. He's already processed the video from my session, and it's available below:

AKA "Supercharged Windows-based Drupal development"

tl;dr: Use either PhpStorm or a Samba share in the VM mounted on the host instead of using a (slow) Vagrant synced folder, and use Drupal VM 4.4's new drupal_deploy features. See the video embedded below for all the details!

I've often mentioned that Windows users who want to build modern Drupal sites and apps are going to have a bit of a difficult time, and even wrote a long post about why this is the case (Developing with VirtualBox and Vagrant on Windows).