1. Drupal development:
The workflow
Anna Fedoruk, Sterno.ru

2. Gold Sponsor of
DrupalCamp Kyiv 2011

3. Silver Sponsors of
DrupalCamp Kyiv 2011

4. Table of contents
1.Dark side of Drupal's power
2.What's the problem and how to deal with
settings in DB
3.Approach 1: migraine-powered workflow
4.Approach 2: features-driven development

5. Why developers cry?
Drupal is great:
• Flexible
• Build whatever you want
• Powerful tools like CCK, Views, Rules, Panles
etc.
So what's the problem?

6. Why developers cry?
OMG, the settings in DB!
• Enabled modules and their settings
• Blocks, taxonomy vocabularies, CCK content
types
• User roles, permissions
• Views, Rules, Contexts, Panels...

7. Why developers cry?
Migrations of DB-ed settings are very time-
consuming, boring and error-prone

8. What can we do?
We need to:
• Track configuration changes
• Migrate these changes
Approaches:
• Migrate changes in DB via versioned dumps
• Move settings into code: Features ecosystem

9. The developer's best friend: Drush
Tons of useful tools:
• Modules enabling, disabling, downloading
• Updates
• Cache clearing
• Dumps, backups, sync
• ...
• + modules add-ons

10. Approach 1: versioned DB dumps

11. Our experience with Migraine
• Migraine by Noosphere Networks
http://ashearer.com/software/server-administration/migraine
• D6 modification by mukesh.agarwal17
http://www.blisstering.com/migraine-synchronize-your-
development-staging-and-production-sites-databases-drupal-6
• drush
• drush add-on by Danil Semelenov

12. The point of Migraine
Migraine knows how to deal with different types of
tables:
• Config tables
• Content tables
• Temporary tables
• Cache tables
• Ignore tables

13. Migraine Drush add-on
A wrapper for migraine commands:
• Create local DB dump
• Restore DB from local dump
• Full site migration including source code and DB
• Sync files on local server with remote server

14. Migraine: workflow
Developer 1: Developer 2:
• Works with code and • pull
configuration • Restores from special
• Makes special dump dump
• Lets Migraine know • Config migrates!
about new tables (if
any)
• commit, push

15. Migraine: workflow
Migration from @dev to @test:
• Make special dump
• Sync files
• Migrate DB
Migration from @dev to @prod:
• Migration doesn't affect content tables
• Manually correct content tables schema

16. Migraine: pros and cons
Advantages:
• As all tables are classified, no need to think
• Doesn't require anything from components
Disadvantages:
• Hard to resolve conflicts in dumps
• Chaos reigns
• In fact you still need to think

17. Approach 2: code-driven development

18. Features: the idea
Image source: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/may/29/making-and-using-features-drupal

19. Features
• Code-driven development: put all the settings
into code
• Features know how to deal with Views, CCK,
Imagecahe, node types, user roles and
permissions, Panels, Contexts, Rules and more

20. Features ecosystem
• Features
• Ctools exportables
• Strongarm — variables
• Boxes — custom blocks (replaces core «add
block»)
• Context — blocks, breadcrumbs and so on
• Diff — a tool for work with features states

21. Feature is a module
• .info — meta-info, dependencies
• .module — place your code here
• .install — usual install file
• .features.inc
Configuration blocks:
• feature_name.<smthng>.inc — generated by
Features module

22. Feature state can be:
• Default — config in code = config in DB
• Overriden — config in code != config in DB
(needs revert or update)
• Needs review — config in code != config in DB,
code was changed

23. A feature workflow
Developer 1 Developer 2
• Creates feature • Pull
• Enables feature • Enables/revert feature
• Works with config • Config migrates!
• Updates feature
• commit, push

24. Features management
• Web UI
• Drush commands:
o view features list
o creates new feature
o updates code state from DB
o updates DB state from code (revert)
o view differencies between code and DB states

25. Features without UI
To create feature or add component:
• Add meta-info and dependencies in .info file
• Update feature

26. What about our coworkers?
feature is a module, so one can use hook_install()
и hook_update() to:
• Enable modules
• Add roles, url aliases etc.
• Any custom code
hook_update() to share with those who work in the
same time
hook_install() to share with new developers

27. Contoller feature
• Includes other features as dependencies
• hook_install() and hook_updates() relfect
general changes in the site's state

28. Features: The Workflow

29. Features: advantages
• Easy to work with code in VCS
• Features are reusable
• Beautiful

30. Features: disadvantages
• Requires more efforts to keep system's state up-
to-date
• Complex dependencies
• Some components aren't exportable

31. Useful links
• More about Migraine
o http://www.slideshare.net/drupalindia/migraine-drupal-syncing-
your-staging-and-live-sites-presentation
• More about Features
o http://developmentseed.org/blog
o http://nuvole.org/blog/code-driven-development
o http://openatrium.com/

32. Contacts
Anna Fedoruk,
Sterno.ru
afedoruk@sterno.ru
@sternodevteam
http://devteam.sterno.ru