drupal vm

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:

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:

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:

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!

VirtualBox's native shared folders will be used by default on Windows with the type of your synced folder set to nfs, or if it's not set. This method works great in many cases, but can be fairly slow when doing work with projects with many files in a synced folder, as is often the case with Drupal sites that I work with in Drupal VM.

Another option is to switch the type to smb. This is often a plug-and-play change (vagrant reload to make the change take effect—you'll likely need to enter in your Windows username and password during the startup process. However, symlinks inside the synced folder will likely break, and so we need to make one more important change:

The synced folder configuration needs to have:

tl;dr: Drupal VM 2.2.0 'Wormhole' was released today, and it adds even more features for local dev!

Over the past few months, I've been working towards a more reliable release cadence for Drupal VM, and I've targeted one or two large features, a number of small improvements, and as many bugfixes as I have time to review. The community surrounding Drupal VM's development has been amazing; in the past few months I've noticed:

[Multiple updates: I've added results for concurrencies of 1 and 10, results on bare metal vs. VMware instances, tested Drupal 8 vs Drupal 7 vs Wordpress 4.4, and I've also retested every single benchmark at least twice! Please make sure you're read through the entire post prior to contesting these benchmark results!]

tl;dr: Always test your own application, and trust, but verify every benchmark you see. PHP 7 is actually faster than HHVM in many cases, neck-in-neck in others, and slightly slower in others. Both PHP 7 and HHVM blow PHP ≤ 5.6 out of the water.

Skip to benchmark results:

One of the motivations behind Drupal VM is flexibility in local development environments. When you develop many different kinds of Drupal sites you need to be able to adapt your environment to the needs of the site—some sites use Memcached and Varnish, others use Solr, and yet others cache data in Redis!

Drupal VM has recently gained much more flexibility in that it now allows configuration options like:

• Choose either Ubuntu or CentOS as your operating system.
• Choose either Nginx or Apahe as your webserver.
• Choose either MySQL or MariaDB for your database.
• Choose either Memcached or Redis as a caching layer.
• Add on extra software like Apache Solr, Node.js, Ruby, Varnish, Xhprof, and more.

Out of the box, Drupal VM installs Drupal 8 on Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5.6 (the most stable release as of December 2015) and MySQL. We're going to make a few quick changes to config.yml so we can run the following local development stack on top of CentOS 7:

Configure Drupal VM

To get started, download or clone a copy of Drupal VM, and follow the Quick Start Guide, but before you run vagrant up (step 2, #6), edit config.yml and make the following changes/additions:

I build and destroy a lot of VMs using Vagrant in the course of the day. Between developing Drupal VM, writing Ansible for DevOps, and testing dozens of Ansible Galaxy roles, I probably run vagrant up and vagrant destroy -f at least a dozen times a day.

Building all these VMs would be a pain, and require much more user intervention, if it weren't for a few things I've done on my local workstation to help with the process. I thought I'd share these tips so you can enjoy a much more streamlined Vagrant workflow as well!

For the past couple years, I've been building Drupal VM to be an extremely-tunable, highly-performant, super-simple development environment. Since MidCamp earlier this year, the project has really taken off, with almost 200 stars on GitHub and a ton of great contributions and ideas for improvement (some implemented, others rejected).

In the time since I wrote Developing for Drupal with Vagrant and VMs, I've focused on meeting all my defined criteria for the perfect local development environment. And now, I'm able to say that I use Drupal VM when developing all my projects—as it is now flexible and fast enough to emulate any production environment I use for various Drupal projects.