drupal 8

Running Drupal in Kubernetes with Docker in production

Update: Since posting this, there have been some interesting new developments in this area, for example:

  • There is now a Drupal/Kubernetes SIG which meets every other Wednesday.
  • There are Kubernetes Drupal Operators which can manage Drupal instances in Kubernetes; I maintain the geerlingguy/drupal-operator but there are a couple others out there in development.

Since 2014, I've been working on various projects which containerized Drupal in a production environment. There have always been a few growing pains—there will for some time, as there are so few places actually using Docker or containers in a production environment (at least in a 'cloud native' way, without tons of volume mounts), though this is changing. It was slow at first, but it's becoming much more rapid.

Drupal 8 successes and failures

Thoughts about Drupal 8, Drupal 7, Backdrop, the Drupal Community, DrupalCon's meteoric price increases, DrupalCamps, and the future of the framework/CMS/enterprise experience engine that is Drupal have been bubbling up in the back of my mind for, well, years now.

I am almost always an optimist about the future, and Drupal 8 promised (and usually delivered) on many things:

  • Vastly improved content administration
  • Views in core, and even better than ever
  • Media in core
  • Layouts in core
  • Modern programming paradigms (fewer #DrupalWTFs)
  • 'Getting off the island' and becoming more of a normal PHP application (kinda the opposite of something like Wordpress)

But one thing that has always been annoying, and now is probably to the state of alarming, for some, is the fact that Drupal 8 adoption has still not hit a level of growth which will put it ahead of Drupal 7 adoption any time soon.

The 2019 Drupal Local Development Survey (updated with results)

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 environments - 2018 usage stats
Local development environment usage results from 2018's survey.

How I upgrade Drupal 8 Sites with exported config and Composer

tl;dr: See the video below for a run-through of my process upgrading Drupal core on the real-world open source Drupal 8 site codebase Drupal Example for Kubernetes.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Over the years, as Drupal has evolved, the upgrade process has become a bit more involved; as with most web applications, Drupal's increasing complexity extends to deployment, and whether you end up running Drupal on a VPS, a bare metal server, in Docker containers, or in a Kubernetes cluster, you should formalize an update process to make sure upgrades are as close to non-events as possible.

Rendering Twig templates programmatically in Drupal 8

From time to time, I have the need to take a Twig template and a set of variables, render the template, replacing all the variables within, and then get the output as a string. For example, if I want to have a really simple email template in a custom module which has a variable for first_name, so I can customize the email before sending it via Drupal or PHP, I could do the following in Drupal 7:

Make composer operations with Drupal way faster and easier on RAM

tl;dr: Run composer require zaporylie/composer-drupal-optimizations:^1.0 in your Drupal codebase to halve Composer's RAM usage and make operations like require and update 3-4x faster.

A few weeks ago, I noticed Drupal VM's PHP 5.6 automated test suite started failing on the step that runs composer require drupal/drush. (PSA: PHP 5.6 is officially dead. Don't use it anymore. If you're still using it, upgrade to a supported version ASAP!). This was the error message I was getting from Travis CI:

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 2147483648 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes) in phar:///usr/bin/composer/src/Composer/DependencyResolver/RuleWatchNode.php on line 40

I ran the test suite locally, and didn't have the same issue (locally I have PHP's CLI memory limit set to -1 so it never runs out of RAM unless I do insane-crazy things.

Deploying an Acquia BLT Drupal 8 site to Kubernetes

BLT to Kubernetes

Wait... what? If you're reading the title of this post, and are familiar with Acquia BLT, you might be wondering:

  • Why are you using Acquia BLT with a project that's not running in Acquia Cloud?
  • You can deploy a project built with Acquia BLT to Kubernetes?
  • Don't you, like, have to use Docker instead of Drupal VM? And aren't you [Jeff Geerling] the maintainer of Drupal VM?

Well, the answers are pretty simple:

Hosted Apache Solr now supports Drupal Search API 8.x-2.x, Solr 7.x

Earlier this year, I completely revamped Hosted Apache Solr's architecture, making it more resilient, more scalable, and better able to support having different Solr versions and configurations per customer.

Today I'm happy to officially announce support for Solr 7.x (in addition to 4.x). This means that no matter what version of Drupal you're on (6, 7, or 8), and no matter what Solr module/version you use (Apache Solr Search or Search API Solr 1.x or 2.x branches), Hosted Apache Solr is optimized for your Drupal search!

Hosted Apache Solr - version selection

Testing the 'Add user' and 'Edit account' forms in Drupal 8 with Behat

On a recent project, I needed to add some behavioral tests to cover the functionality of the Password Policy module. I seem to be a sucker for pain, because often I choose to test the things it seems there's no documentation on—like testing the functionality of the partially-Javascript-powered password fields on the user account forms.

In this case, I was presented with two challenges:

  • I needed to run one scenario where a user edits his/her own password, and must follow the site's configured password policy.
  • I needed to run another scenario where an admin creates a new user account, and must follow the site's configured password policy for the created user's password.

So I came up with the following scenarios:

Running Drupal Cron Jobs in Kubernetes

There are a number of things you have to do to make Drupal a first-class citizen inside a Kubernetes cluster, like adding a shared filesystem (e.g. PV/PVC over networked file share) for the files directory (which can contain generated files like image derivatives, generated PHP, and twig template caches), and setting up containers to use environment variables for connection details (instead of hard-coding things in settings.php).

But another thing which you should do for better performance and traceability is run Drupal cron via an external process. Drupal's cron is essential to many site operations, like cleaning up old files, cleaning out certain system tables (flood, history, logs, etc.), running queued jobs, etc. And if your site is especially reliant on timely cron runs, you probably also use something like Ultimate Cron to manage the cron jobs more efficiently (it makes Drupal cron work much like the extensive job scheduler in a more complicated system like Magento).