drupal planet

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!

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group (STLDUG) just finished it's fourth Drupal Camp, held at UMSL yesterday. I had a great time meeting with everyone, and am excited for next year! Last year I had to miss the Camp due to unexpected surgery, but this year I was able to attend and even bring some of my photo gear, to take pictures (I love contributing to open source through means other than code!); here's the obligatory 'whole camp' photo:

You can view all my photos from the camp in an album on Flickr: Drupal Camp St. Louis 2017 photos by geerlingguy

I've been working on building a reproducible configuration for Drupal Photo Gallery, a project born out of this year's Acquia Build Hackathon.

We originally built the site on an Acquia Cloud CD environment, and this environment uses a pretty traditional LAMP stack. We didn't encounter any difficulty using AWS Lambda to post image data back to the Drupal site via Drupal's RESTful Web Services API.

The POST request is built in Node.js using:

There are a number of scenarios in Drupal 8 where you might notice your MySQL database size starts growing incredibly fast, even if you're not adding any content. Most often, in my experience, the problem stems from a exponentially-increasing-in-size cache_render table. I've had enough private conversations about this issue that I figure I'd write this blog post to cover common scenarios, as well as short and long-term fixes if you run into this issue.

Consider the following scenarios I've seen where a cache_render table increased to 10, 50, 100 GB or more:

(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: