Tutorials

Local development environments are in the midst a bit of a renaissance recently - mainly driven by the maturation and adoption of Docker-based solutions.

As someone who has been building Drupal sites for over 12 years now, I'd like to think that my knowledge and expertise has grown at a rate similar to the power, flexibility, and complexity of the Drupal project itself. For well over 10 years, Drupal training and development has been the focus of my consulting business; over the holidays I took some time to look back and really think about the lessons I've learned and how I can utilize them moving forward. 

Over the past year or so, I've been looking to replace my standard local development environment with a Docker-based solution.

Over the past several weeks, I've been working with three of the more well-known Docker-based local development environments that involve a Drupal focus: Docksal, DDEV, and Lando. The goal is to not only to figure out which one I prefer, but also to figure out which our two long-form online Drupal training classes should potentially standardize on.

Over the past few months, I've been test-driving various Docker-based local development environments with two goals in mind. First, as my "daily driver" for consulting work - I've been a long-time MAMP Pro user and I've been feeling for a long time that I need to modernize my local development tools.

Over the past few months, I've been evaluating three Docker-based local development environments trying to figure out which is best not only for me, but also for students of our long-form Managing Professional Drupal Development Workflows with Pantheon (next semester starts February 17) and Drupal Career Online (March 26) classes.

is a fantastic tool for helping to write Drupal 8 modules; of that there is little debate. Its "generate" functionality takes much of the pain out of setting up the scaffolding for many types of Drupal 8 modules, and in the process that alone saves developers a significant amount of time.

Note: This blog post is based on Drupal 8.1.x. It is an updated version of a previous tutorial based on Drupal 8.0.x. While the concepts are largely the same as 8.0.x, a refactoring of the core migrate modules took place in Drupal 8.1.x (migrations will become plugins in 8.1.x). This updated tutorial updates the previous example to work with Drupal 8.1.x, as well as demonstrates how to specify a migration group and run the migration with Drush. If you're familiar with the previous tutorial, you may want to skip to the "Rolling up our sleeves" section below.

Even if you're only casually acquainted with Drupal 8, you probably know that the core upgrade path to Drupal 8 has been completely rewritten from the ground-up, using many of the concepts of the Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal migration modules. Using the Migrate upgrade module, it is possible to migrate much of a Drupal 6 (or Drupal 7) site to Drupal 8 with a minimum of fuss (DrupalEasy.com is a prime example of this). "Migrate upgrade" is similar to previous Drupal core upgrade paths - there are no options to pick-and-choose what is to be migrated - it's all-or-nothing. This blog post provides an example of how to migrate content from only a single, simple content type in a Drupal 6 site to a Drupal 8.1.x site, without writing any PHP code at all.

Note: This blog post is based on Drupal 8.0.x. While the concepts will remain the same in 8.1.x, the code examples will no longer be valid because migrations will become plugins in 8.1.x. See the updated blog post here.

Even if you're only casually acquainted with Drupal 8, you probably know that the core upgrade path to Drupal 8 has been completely rewritten from the ground-up, using many of the concepts of the Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal migration modules. Using the Migrate upgrade module, it is possible to migrate much of a Drupal 6 (or Drupal 7) site to Drupal 8 with a minimum of fuss (DrupalEasy.com is a prime example of this). "Migrate upgrade" is similar to previous Drupal core upgrade paths - there are no options to pick-and-choose what is to be migrated - it's all-or-nothing. This blog post provides an example of how to migrate content from only a single, simple content type in a Drupal 6 site to a Drupal 8 site, without writing any PHP code at all.

It's been a long time coming, so we are really happy to announce that DrupalEasy.com recently relaunched on Drupal 8 (8.0.3, to be precise)! Our previous site was also our original - built on Drupal 6 with more than its fair share of cruft.