Drupal 8 Development at the Speed of Lightning (& BLT)

1 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Johnnie Fox, CTO, Promet Source
Steve Zipfel, Drupal Solutions Architect, Promet Source
Matthew Grasmick, Senior Technical Services Manager, Acquia
Drupal 8 Development at the
Speed of Lightning (& BLT)

Introductions
● Matthew Grasmick
o Acquia PS, 5yrs; Drupalist, 8yrs
o Maintainer of BLT
● Johnnie Fox
o Chief Technology Officer at Promet Source; Drupalist, 7yrs
● Steve Zipfel
o Solutions architect at Promet Source; Drupalist, 7yrs

©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Itinerary
● Overview of BLT
● Overview of Lightning
● Build Philosophy
● Case Study
o The BLT way: South Florida Water Management
● Key Takeaways

BLT’s Genesis:
Professional Services Experience

We started from scratch
for every project

Snowflakes
● Every project is unique.
o Difficult to support and maintain.
o Collaboration & handoffs are messy.
o Resources are not interchangeable.
● Risks?
o Wasted time.
o Missed deadlines.
o Smaller margins.
o Lower value.
o Staff burnout.

Let’s try something different

Use one template
and one set of tools
for every project.

Acquia Build & Launch Tools (BLT)
● Standardized template for Drupal 8 sites
● Set of tools for building, testing, deploying
● Commands for automating usage of those tools

BLT is part of your codebase
● Like a module
– Install a particular version
– Update hooks required between versions
● Not an application
– Not installed at system-level

Acquia Lightning

Acquia Lightning
– A Drupal 8 distribution maintained by Acquia
– Enable developers to build great enterprise authoring experiences for
their editorial teams with D8

Acquia Lightning
● Layout
o Built on Panels, Panels IPE, & Panelizer
● Media
o Built with Media Entity, Entity Browser, Entity Embed
● Workflow
o Built on Workbench Moderation, Scheduled Updates
● Preview
o Multiversion, Workspace, Replication
o Experimental - Stable Q3 2017

It’s business time

Johnnie Fox - Business

Build Philosophy
– https://12factor.net/

Continuous Integration Principles

Drupal 7 Build Framework

Downsides of Custom Framework
Time + Money + Effort
Lack of Community Support + New Ideas

South Florida Water Management

Drupal 8
Accessible
6 Month
Timeline
Optimized
Performance
Acquia
Hosting
South Florida Water Management

Steve Zipfel - Development

Pre-defined build process - Hit the ground running.
BLT and Promet Source: A perfect match.

Development Team
1 Architect / Developer
1 Drupal Developer
1 Themer
100% Remote across different continents and timezones
Quick delivery
Drupal 8
Community

Makes complex things simple
– Create an entire project
– Create and boot a VM
– Run every test
– Validate all of your code
– Sync environments
– Deploy to cloud
Do the following tasks with a single command:

Plus!
– Built in tests with BHAT and PHPUNIT so you’re not starting from scratch:
– Built in code validation tools PHP Code Sniffer and Linting

Development Processes
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd /var/www/sites/website_root
For more: http://blt.readthedocs.io/en/8.x/readme/onboarding/
Run blt local:setup to rebuild the codebase and reinstall your Drupal site (most commonly
used early in development).
Run blt local:refresh to rebuild the codebase, import a fresh DB from a remote environment,
and run schema/configuration updates (most commonly used later in development).

28 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary28 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Stay Safe!
Software Updates
BLT uses Composer
‘Composer update’ updates the composer.lock file which will update modules,
drupal core and libraries on build
# update blt and its dependencies
composer update acquia/blt --with-dependencies
# Remove deprecated files.
blt cleanup
# update all dependencies, in case BLT modified your
composer.json during previous update.
composer update

Joint development with client and
seamless handoff
Existing Documentation and
Existing, well defined process

Deployment build - Just the (Arti)facts
./blt.sh deploy -Ddeploy.commitMsg='REPO-NAME-XXX: The commit message.' -Ddeploy.branch='develop-build-
repo-name-xxx'
XXX = the issue number.
What is an artifact?
Artifacts are ONLY the items required for running the website.
What types of things aren’t artifacts?
● CHANGELOG.txt
● Vagrantfile
And many other tools required for development but not for running the
website

Artifacts vs Full Dev Code.

Seamless integration with Acquia Cloud
– Push a deploy branch to the Acquia git repository
– Select the branch from the UI to deploy the new branch

Give back!
BLT is open source so you can contribute to the BLT project.
http://blt.readthedocs.io/en/8.x/readme/dev-workflow/

Resources
● http://blt.readthedocs
● https://github.com/acquia/blt
● https://dev.acquia.com/blog/introducing-acquia-blt-a-development-tool-for-generating-
new-drupal-8-projects/25/05/2016/10486
● https://dev.acquia.com/blog/deploying-to-acquia-cloud-with-blt/05/07/2016/15781

Project Closeout

South Florida Water District

South Florida Water District
– 1st Project risk register to
contain hurricane risk
– 1st project impacted by
hurricane

Project results

Key Take Aways
– Low Set up time
– Initial investment to get started is low
– Lightning greatly reduced module selection time

Questions?

Thank You

Drupal 8 Development at the Speed of Lightning (& BLT)

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