vagrant

After doing a video testing different external GPUs on a Raspberry Pi last week, I realized two things:

1. Compiling the Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi is slow. It took 54 minutes, and I ended up doing it 7 times during the course of testing for that video.
2. If you ever want to figure out a better way to do something, write a blog post or create a video showing the less optimal way of doing it.

To the second point, about every fifth comment was telling me to cross-compile Linux on a faster machine instead of doing it on the Pi itself. For example:

And on the Pi Forums, it seems like nobody worth their salt compiles the kernel on the Pi either, so I figured—since I'm probably going to have to do it again another thousand times in my life—I might as well put together a guide for how to do it on a Mac.

Since this is the third time I've burned more than a few hours on this particular problem, I thought I'd finally write up a blog post. Hopefully I find this post in the future, the fourth time I run into the problem.

What problem is that? Well, when I build a new Kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes in VirtualBox (usually orchestrated with Vagrant and Ansible, using my geerlingguy.kubernetes role), I get everything running. kubectl works fine, all pods (including CoreDNS, Flannel or Calico, kube-apiserver, the scheduler) report Running, and everything in the cluster seems right. But there are lots of strange networking issues.

Sometimes internal DNS queries work. Most of the time not. I can't ping other pods by their IP address. Some of the debugging I do includes:

It's been five years since Drupal VM's first release, and to celebrate, it's time to release Drupal VM 5.0 "Flynn Lives"! This update is not a major architectural shift, but instead, a new major version that updates many defaults to use the latest versions of the base VM OS and application software. Some of the new default versions include:

• Ubuntu 18.04 'Bionic' LTS (was Ubuntu 16.04)
• PHP 7.2 (was PHP 7.1)
• Node.js 10.x (was Node.js 6.x)

See the full release notes here: Drupal VM 5.0.0 "Flynn Lives"

There are also a number of other small improvements (as always), and ever-increasing test coverage for all the Ansible roles that power Drupal VM. And in the Drupal VM 4.x release lifecycle, a new official pre-baked Drupal VM base box was added, the geerlingguy/drupal-vm Vagrant base box. Using that base box can speed up new VM builds by 50% or more!

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:

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).

Windows 10 is the only release Acquia's BLT officially supports. But there are still many people who use Windows 7 and 8, and most of these people don't have control over what version of Windows they use.

Drupal VM has supported Windows 7, 8, and 10 since I started building it a few years ago (at that time I was still running Windows 7), and using a little finesse, you can actually get an entire modern BLT-based Drupal 8 project running on Windows 7 or 8, as long as you do all the right things, as will be demonstrated in this blog post.

Quite often, I get inquiries from developers about how to get Drupal VM working on Windows 10—and this is often after encountering error after error due to many different factors. Just for starters, I'll give a few tips for success when using Drupal VM (or most any Linux-centric dev tooling or programming languages) on Windows 10:

Seven months after Drupal VM 3 introduced PHP 7.0 and Ubuntu 16.04 as the default, as well as more stable team-based development environment tooling, Drupal VM 4 is here!

Thanks especially to the efforts of Oskar Schöldström and Thom Toogood, who helped push through some of the more tricky fixes for this release!