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About 7 years ago, Washington State University, Vancouver set up their 11 websites on Aegir using a single Drupal 8 codebase. Thanks to Aegir, our client and friend Aaron Thorne was able to maintain all 11 websites by himself, despite not being a Drupal developer. Eventually, though, it was time for something new.

Last year, they contacted me to upgrade their sites and the hosting platform, but keep it inside their own private server infrastructure.

We took our time to figure out how we could design a new model for a multisite codebase, hosting, testing.

How can we implement reliable quality controls and automated delivery across all 11 sites? How can we make it as easy as possible for developers and system administrators to maintain? How can we leave WSU Vancouver with a system that they can use long term, so that they can update their codebase... forever?

The answer? A new self-contained system using DDEV, GitHub Actions, and clever usage of settings.php and Drush aliases.

I gotta be honest: as a developer, working this way has been a dream.

I couldn't log in today. Weird. Turns out I left a space after my username in the login field.

Somehow I remembered that Drupal will trim your password of whitespace before looking it up.

Just confirmed it. You can put as many spaces as you want after your password in any Drupal login form. 

But if you do it to your username? Baffled. You've stumped Drupal.

It's kinda fun. 

GitHub Actions and BitBucket Pipelines are amazing. You can control what is run using yaml files in your codebase. 

You can run just about any command, and they provide a really powerful interface for browsing jobs and logs.

Many people are unaware, you can also control where your scripts are run. If you setup a tool called a Git Runner, you can run Git Actions anywhere, including from your local machine.

The new Operations Site Runner allows you to spawn environments very quickly using GitHub Actions on your own servers.

It provides a full lifecycle for every pull request, spinning up a new environment, running tests, and leaving it there for humans to review. 

I recently moved ThinkDrop.net to this new system, so I figured it was time to demonstrate it.

Check out this quick 10 minute video of me deploying the Gin admin theme to my Drupal site!

I've been building and designing automation systems for almost 20 years. I built DevShop on top of Aegir to implement continuous integration and quality control over 10 years ago.

Running CI systems is hard. Really hard. There needs to be an active task runner. A dashboard. API integrations. Tooling. Network Access. It can be incredibly complicated. In the Enterprise? Forget it.

I've been imagining a new system for many years, and here it is.

Recently we finished a project that was being moved to Pantheon.

We created a couple custom scripts for pushing data into the pantheon environment, and for pulling data down for continuous integration runs.

The scripts require the Terminus CLI tool created by Pantheon to interact with it's service.

Terminus is a composer project, but it's dependencies don't align with the latest Drupal sites. It's best to install it as a phar file and run it that way.

Over 5 years ago I started giving presentations on "Test Driven Development".

Here's the session.  

In our line of work, we often deal with many different websites. One of my clients, Vardot, is responsible for over 100 websites. To ensure each site is running smoothly, they needed a tool to keep track of all of them in one place, and hired me to build a "Drupal Support Dashboard", or DSD.

The Site Audit module is a classic. It will reach 10 years old in June of 2023. It gives you a detailed report of your Drupal site in the web admin, providing a nice pass-fail display for review. It has a drush command that renders the report to the terminal in HTML, text, or JSON.

Earlier this year, we started a new project that resulted in a few new features for Site Module, launching the 4.x version branch. 

After my presentation on Site Audit 4, I was approached by an audience member, Irina Zaks of Fibonacci Web Studio.

It turns out, the Site Audit module never had a web interface in Drupal 7. It was a drush-only tool that could output HTML, but there was no code ever written to display the audit in the site.

As anyone who has used Behat for Drupal knows, configuring it can be difficult.

Hi, all. Been a while. Five years since I posted a blog. I can't lie. It's been rough.

I have much to discuss, from my mental health condition to my open source projects. It's really hard for me to publish things when my life is in disarray, but now is the time to rebuild.

Over the next few weeks I am going to start writing regularly, both on technical and personal subjects. I've got some exciting new modules, new services like training, and tons of helpful Drupal information that I'd like to share.

As we head into DrupalCon week I've got something big to announce. With the blessing of the Aegir core maintainers, I am taking the 4.x branch of Provision I have been working on and I am separating it from the Aegir Project.

Provision 4 will still power Aegir. We are working on a patch to Hostmaster that will allow us to run a different command other than Drush, allowing Provision4 to become the primary back-end to Aegir 4. This means it will also be able to power the current generation DevShop.

In just a few hours, the first serious critical security update for Drupal since "Drupalgeddon" will be released.

To make this update easier for DevShop users, we've pushed out a new release with 2 features that allow you to update your sites without ever leaving your web browser: "Update, Commit & Push" and "Tag a Release".

"Commit & Push"

The "Update Drupal" button has been available in DevShop for some time, but now you can automatically commit the results by checking a box.

I presented at the first Drupal NYC Meetup of the year!

I've been hard at work building a new Provision: the command-line interface for Aegir. We are moving off Drush commands into our own CLI built in Symfony. The tool is finally a working MVP, so I figured it's time to spread the word! 

First I give a bit of background on the Aegir project and my goals for the project which can be summed up in one word: easy.

Last week I was honored to be selected to speak at the 4th Cornell DrupalCamp at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Aaron Froehlich joined me to speak on how his team uses DevShop at the Cornell ILR School.

Aaron's been using DevShop since the 0.x days to fire up copies of his website for different git branches, making it easy to review his team's work.

UPDATE: Slides and Video of the session are now available.

Every time there is a big DrupalCamp or Con we submit sessions thinking we will talk about our open source hosting and testing platform, DevShop. The specific theme for each talk usually aligns with whatever the latest features are, or is just a general (boring) overview of the features.

PHOTO: Founding members Mathieu Lutfy, Jon Pugh, Christopher Gervais, and Cameron Eagans.  Credit: Chris Doten, NDI.

Last week, thousands of open source developers and enthusiasts converged on the United Nations Headquarters for the first annual OpenCamps conference.

In the last few days We've been able to get Aegir working in a docker container.

See http://github.com/aegir-project/dockerfiles for the code and https://hub.docker.com/r/aegir/hostmaster/ for the images.  There are example docker-compose.yml file in the codebase that you can use to launch aegir really quickly.

We are excited to announce that OpenDevShop Inc is a Gold Sponsor of DrupalGovCon 2016! As a part of our sponsorship we are offering a free training on Friday July 22nd.

Please Sign up Now, space is limited!

We are going to cover every aspect of DevShop, from installation to testing and cloud management.

Last week we returned from DrupalNorth in Montreal. It’s the largest camp in Canada, with a rotating location.  Being based in Brooklyn, it’s an easy 11 hour train ride to Montreal, so this year was an ideal time to venture out of the states to our neighbor to the north.

With the release of the first beta of DevShop we completed the switch to using Ansible Galaxy Roles, which are open source, collaborative infrastructure. Up until the last alpha release, DevShop installed via it's own custom playbook.

Now, each component of DevShop is broken out into separate Ansible Galaxy Roles, extending Jeff Geerling's playbooks.

After four years of hard work, we're headed to DrupalCon this year with reason to celebrate: The release of DevShop 1.0.0.  

Why, you ask, did it take four years to reach 1.0?

Semantics

One year ago, we decided to reset DevShop back to zero with Semantic Versioning.

Software evolves over time as any technology. When people invent new things, they usually launch new businesses for those inventions. They patent them. They protect their intellectual property for as long as they can.

At some point, proprietary technology becomes so prolific, that the need for agreed upon standards becomes necessary. Edison wouldn't have sold nearly as many light bulbs if they didn't standardize the size of the sockets and the shape of the two prongs, among other more important things like voltage.

In a few hours, I'll be heading to Princeton University for my fourth DrupalCamp New Jersey.

This camp holds a special place in my heart because it was the first place that I spoke about OpenDevShop in public.

DrupalCamp NJ brought me out of my lonely freelancer shell and into the larger Drupal community. 

Our new slogan says a lot to us.

The name "ThinkDrop" sounded good to me when it first came to me for a few reasons.  

"Think: Drupal!" comes to mind.

But to me, "Drop" also means "Release".

The fastest way to make great software is to quickly iterate through the cycles, releasing early and releasing often, collecting feedback all the way through.

Think. Drop. Repeat.

Aegir Summit & DevOps Camp at NYCcamp 2015

This Thursday starts NYCcamp, which is gearing up to be a huge event.

This year they've expanded even more beyond Drupal to all free & open source technologies.

Well before "DevOps" was a thing, and long before DevShop existed, was "CI". Continuous Integration is a critical part of successful software development.  As a web CMS, Drupal has lagged a bit behind in joining up with this world of CI.

I'm headed to DrupalCon on Monday morning, and hope to spend most of my time recruiting users and sprinters to DevShop development.

The DrupalCon sprints are an amazing opportunity to work together with people in person. Despite being very remote-oriented, there really is no replacement for face to face work, especially when it comes to complex projects like DevShop.

There are a number of opportunities this week to come learn about devshop.

Sprints

I'm on the plane headed to my 4th DrupalCon, and this one is looking like a good time.  

So much is happening this year. Drupal 8 is getting closer and closer to release, more and more Drupal businesses and services are being launched, and we continue to develop our Drupal products.

While my session on DevShop wasn't accepted, I am personally involved in a lot of BoF sessions this year.

Introducing HubDrop.org

This project is simply something I wanted to do. No one paid for it. I built it in my spare time as a way to refine the knowledge I learned over the last few years about Symfony, Vagrant, and Chef. I want to grow this tool, but it takes time and a server, which both == money.

So I'm opening up a GitTip account to raise funding for development of hubdrop.io.

But before I do that, I wanted to formally introduce HubDrop to the Drupal aocmmunity.

Just going to DrupalCon to watch is awe inspiring.  The amount of people there, all sharing one common goal: to learn more and grow the power of Drupal, thereby empowering themselves... it's all really inspiring stuff.  There's more than a few reasons I keep coming back.

Time and time again the debate about "what is content" and "what is configuration" comes up. I think not often enough we talk about it in words but not in the intentions of what you are building. This article is just about content, because everything else is just code.

First of all, what is "Content", really? It recently has become crystal clear to me: