README

This is an example of a starting point for developing the "Promet Way".

You can most easily start your Drupal project with this baseline by using Composer:

composer create-project promet/drupal7-framework your_project_name

Running this command will download the latest release of this project to a new directory called your_project_name and invoke composer install inside it, which will trigger additional scripts to create a working Drupal root in the www subdirectory from the packages downloaded with composer.

We reference a custom composer repository in composer.json here. This repository was created by traversing the list of known projects on drupal.org using drupal/parse-composer, and has the package metadata for all the valid packages with a Drupal 7 release, including Drupal itself.

We use drupal/tangler to create the Drupal root by reacting to the install and update events, and a custom installer provided by drupal/drupal-library-installer-plugin to handle placing ckeditor in the libraries directory of the resulting Drupal application. Also, we render a settings.php file from cnf/config.yml using winmillwill/settings_compile, which assures us that an operator without php familiarity but with knowledge of the different tunables in settings.php will be able to update different deployments of the application without needing to kludge anything.

As you add modules to your project, just update composer.json and run composer update. You will also need to pin some versions down as you run across point releases that break other functionality. If you are fastidious with this practice, you will never accidentally install the wrong version of a module if a point release should happen between your testing, and client sign off, and actually deploying changes to production. If you are judicious with your constraints, you will be able to update your contrib without trying to remember known untenable versions and work arounds -- you will just run composer update and be done.

This strategy may sound a lot like drush make, but it's actually what you would get if you took the good ideas that lead to drush make, and then discarded everything else about it, and then discarded those good ideas for better ideas, and then added more good ideas.

See:

Project Customization

You may want to customize a couple of things about your box first. The scripts are built to take most of the work out of configuration. There are pretty much two things you may want to do:

Change the Project Name

By editing the project variable, you can give your project a custom name. Note that this will affect several other configurations in the build as well, including what the base module will be called and what folder the site will live in.

Change the VM IP

You can edit the IP variable if you want to run more than one VM at a time.

Getting Started Developing

You need to edit your machine's local host file. Add the entry 10.33.36.11 drupalproject.dev
Run vagrant up --provision to build the environment.
ssh in with vagrant ssh
Navigate to /var/www/sites/drupalproject.dev.
PARTY!!!

Vagrant provision currently does a full site install.

To update without rebuilding, run build/update.sh from the project root in the vagrant box.

It is also worth noting, if you are working on an existing site, that the default install script allows you to provide a reference database in order to start your development. Simply add a sql file to either of the following:

build/ref/drupalproject.sql
build/ref/drupalproject.sql.gz

Use

IMPORTANT

This project uses the drop_ship module to handle the reusable part of deployment, so everything will get disabled if you don't define dependencies. The DROPSHIP_SEEDS environment variable (see directly below) should consist of only the top level project module and environment specific modules.

DROPSHIP_SEEDS=drupalproject:devel

Easy Development with Vagrant

We have a Vagrantfile that references a Debian 7 box with php 5.4 and apache2 and mysql. Once you have installed Vagrant, you can begin development like so:

vagrant up                                 # turn on the box and provision it
vagrant ssh                                # log into the box like it's a server
cd /var/www/sites/drupalproject.dev        # go to the sync'ed folder on the box
alias drush="$PWD/vendor/bin/drush -r $PWD/www" # use drush from composer
drush <whatever>                           # do some stuff to your website

The Build and Deployment Scripts

You may have noticed that provisioning the Vagrant box causes build/install.sh to be invoked, and that this causes all of our modules to be enabled, giving us a starting schema.

You should note that build/install.sh really just installs Drupal and then passes off to build/update.sh, which is the reusable and non-destructive script for applying updates in code to a Drupal site with existing content. This is the tool you can use when testing to see if your changes have been persisted in such a way that your collaborators can use them:

build/install.sh                                # get a baseline
alias drush="$PWD/vendor/bin/drush -r $PWD/www" # use drush from composer
drush sql-dump > base.sql                       # save your baseline
# ... do a whole bunch of Drupal hacking ...
drush sql-dump > tmp.sql                        # save your intended state
drush -y sql-drop && drush sqlc < base.sql      # restore baseline state
build/update.sh                                 # apply changes to the baseline

You should see a lot of errors if, for example, you failed to provide an update hook for deleting a field whose fundamental config you are changing. Or, perhaps you've done the right thing and clicked through the things that should be working now and you see that it is not working as expected. This is a great time to fix these issues, because you know what you meant to do and your collaborators don't!

The actual application of updates, including managing the enabled modules, firing their update hooks, disabling things that should not be enabled and reverting features is handled by drupal/drop_ship, which uses (a fork of) kw_manifests for providing an extensible set of deployment tasks that have dependencies on one another.

Because manifests can't receive commandline arguments, we pass information to them with Environment Variables and we provide an env.dist from which to create a .env file that our scripts will then source. This allows an operator with access to the target environment to update these tunables out of channel so that you can deploy any arbitrary revision to any environment.

Particularly, the list of modules used to generate the dependency graph of all the things we should enable resides in the DROPSHIP_SEEDS environment variable. You may notice that it's a list of one and that it's a poorly named do-nothing module with nothing besides dependencies. In real life, you would name this module something relevant to your project and it would be responsible for over-arching functionality or the application, like providing the minimal set of modules to generate the dependencies of everything that must be enabled for the application to work properly. You can think of this like an install profile that doesn't suck, because it's not a singleton, so with care, you can embed your whole project in another project that uses this workflow.

See:

Testing Locally

All the testing that happens in an automated way can be done the same way on your virtual machine. Simply run this command from your the project folder and it will do coding standard testing:

./build/drupalcs.sh

Or run this command that will do behat testing:

./build/runtests.sh

TODO

Change build/scripts/default_set_theme to a manifest
Make the README pithier, factor out discussions into an article or blog

promet / drupal7-framework

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