drupal planet

Use Drupal 8 Cache Tags with Varnish and Purge

Varnish cache hit in Drupal 8

Over the past few months, I've been reading about BigPipe, Cache Tags, Dynamic Page Cache, and all the other amazing-sounding new features for performance in Drupal 8. I'm working on a blog post that more comprehensively compares and contrasts Drupal 8's performance with Drupal 7, but that's a topic for another day. In this post, I'll focus on cache tags in Drupal 8, and particularly their use with Varnish to make cached content expiration much easier than it ever was in Drupal 7.

Happy #PiDay 2016 - Celebrating with the Raspberry Pi

I think today was my most Pi-full π day, ever! Let's see:

Early in the morning, I finished upgrading all the Ansible playbooks used by the Raspberry Pi Dramble so my cluster of five Raspberry Pis would run faster and better on the latest version of official Raspberry Pi OS, Raspbian Jessie.

Later, opensource.com published an article I wrote about using Raspberry Pis placed throughout my house to help my kids sleep better:

Developing with VirtualBox and Vagrant on Windows

I've been supporting Drupal VM (a local Drupal CMS development environment) for Windows, Mac, and Linux for the past couple years, and have been using Vagrant and virtual machines for almost all my development (mostly PHP, but also some Python and Node.js at the moment) for the past four years. One theme that comes up quite frequently when dealing with VMs, open source software stacks (especially Drupal/LAMP), and development, is how much extra effort there is to make things work well on Windows.

Problem: tool-builders use Linux or macOS

The big problem, I see, is that almost all the tool-builders for OSS web software run either macOS or a flavor of Linux, and many don't even have access to a Windows PC (outside of maybe an odd VM for testing sites in Internet Explorer or Edge, if they're a designer/front-end developer). My evidence is anecdotal, but go to any OSS conference/meetup and you'll likely see the same.

Blog post id enumeration can lead to unwanted information disclosure

With the rampant speculation there will be a new Raspberry Pi model released next week, I was wondering if the official Raspberry Pi blog might reveal anything of interest; they just posted a Four Years of Pi blog post on the 26th, which highlighted the past four years, and mentioned the excitement surrounding 4th anniversary of Pi sales, coming up on February 29th, 2016.

Glancing at the blog's source, I noticed it looks like a Wordpress blog (using httpie on the cli):

$ http https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/four-years-of-pi/ | grep generator
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.4.2" />

Having set up a few WP sites in the past, I knew there was a simple way to load content by its ID, using a URL in the form:

Drupal VM - Quick Introduction Video

After months of having this on my todo list, I've finally had the time to record a quick introduction video for Drupal VM. Watch the video below, then a transcript below the video:

Drupal VM is a local development environment for Drupal that's built with Vagrant and Ansible. It helps you build and maintain Drupal sites using best practices and the best tools. In this quick overview, I'll show you where you can learn more about Drupal VM, then show you a simple Drupal VM setup.

The Drupal VM website gives a general overview of the project and links to:

Drupal VM 2.3.0 released - dashboard, Windows, tests, and more

Update: I just posted a new video about Drupal VM, Drupal VM - Quick Introduction, covering some of these new features!

I'm excited to announce the release of Drupal VM 2.3.0 "Miracle and Magician"—with over 21 new features and bugs fixed!

One of the most amazing improvements is the new Drupal VM dashboard; after you build Drupal VM, visit the VM's IP address to see all the sites, tools, and connection details in your local development environment:

Drupal VM 2.3.0 release - new dashboard UI

This feature was singlehandedly implemented by Oskar Schöldström—who also happens to have practically matched my commit activity for the past month or so. I'm pretty sure I owe him something like 100 beers at this point!

Here are some of the other great new features of Drupal VM in 2.3.0:

Reddit AMA on Monday, Feb 22 – ask me about Drupal VM, Honeypot or anything!

I'll be hosting a Reddit AMA on the Drupal subreddit tomorrow morning, Monday February 22, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. Central.

During the AMA, I would love to hear any questions you have about Drupal VM, Honeypot, Ansible, writing, open source communities, or really anything else you can think of! I just wrapped up a big project last week, so I'll have a couple hours tomorrow to talk about anything and everything with the Drupal community on Reddit. Even horse-sized ducks and Legos, if you're so inclined.

I'll also be formally announcing the next major release of Drupal VM, with some amazing new features for local Drupal development, so please check in tomorrow morning!

Set up a hierarchical taxonomy term Facet using Facet API with Search API Solr

I wanted to document this here just because it took me a little while to get all the bits working just right so I could have a hierarchical taxonomy display inside a Facet API search facet, rather than a flat display of only the taxonomy terms directly related to the nodes in the current search.

Basically, I had a search facet on a search page that allowed users to filter search results by a taxonomy term, and I wanted it to show the taxonomy's hierarchy:

Flat taxonomy to hierarchical taxonomy display using Search API Solr and Facet API in Drupal 7

To do this, you need to do two main things:

  1. Make sure your taxonomy field is being indexed with taxonomy hierarchy data intact.
  2. Set up the Facet API facet for this taxonomy term so it will display the full hierarchy.

Let's first start by making sure the taxonomy information is being indexed (refer to the image below):

Configuring CloudFlare with Drupal 8 to protect the Pi Dramble

In a prior post on the constraints of in-home website hosting, I mentioned one of the major hurdles to serving content quickly and reliably over a home Internet connection is the bandwidth you get from your ISP. I also mentioned one way to mitigate the risk of DoSing your own home Internet is to use a CDN and host images externally.

At this point, I have both of those things set up for www.pidramble.com (a Drupal 8 site hosted on a cluster of Raspberry Pis in my basement!), and I wanted to outline how I set up Drupal 8 and CloudFlare so almost all requests to www.pidramble.com are served through CloudFlare directly to the end user!

CloudFlare Configuration

Before anything else, you need a CloudFlare account; the free plan offers the minimal necessary features (though you should consider upgrading to a better plan if you have anything beyond the simplest use cases in mind!). Visit the CloudFlare Plans page and sign up for a Free account.