Chris Tankersley has been doing PHP development for 9 years and has experience with both Drupal and non-Drupal projects. He discusses various tools for local Drupal development including Acquia Dev Desktop, Vagrant, Drupal SimpleTest, Drush, Backup and Migrate, Devel, and Features. He emphasizes writing tests before coding, using caching, and leveraging these tools to improve performance, portability, and the development workflow.

1. May 16th, 2013 php|tek 2013 1
E-mail: chris@ctankersley.com
Twitter: @dragonmantank
App.net: @ctankersleyhttps://joind.in/8153

2.  ChrisTankersley
 Doing PHP for 9Years
 Lots of projects no one uses, and a few that
some do
 TL;DR https://github.com/dragonmantank
 Heavy Drupal Development for 2 years
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3.  Don’t use Drupal
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4.  Don’t abuse Drupal
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5. What powers your site
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6.  Pre-built *AMP Stack
 Available for Drupal 6 or 7
 Install and Ready to Go
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Advantages
Disadvantages
 Not built for multiple installs
 Can’t use for existing sites
 Only forWindows and Mac

7.  Best to use for module or theme
development
 I don’t like it for full site development
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8.  Make use of the “Sites” option to help
separate work
 On Mac, only the /sites/all/ folder is writable
 Even Sites you create are not writable
 Don’t put the entire stack inVC, just your
work
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 Full server to run code
 Self contained and can be replicated
 Most modern machines can doVM
Advantages
Disadvantages
 Uses more resources
 Easier to break

10.  Best to use for full site development
 Or use it all the time, it’s nice to have an
environment you control
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11.  Try and pick a distro that is close to your production
setup. If you are running Redhat in production, set up
an CentOS box
 Set up the document root for your web server to be
the /vagrant folder (or sub folder, depending on your
site layout).This way your site will run automatically.
 If you are running CentOS and Apache, disable
SELinux so that Apache will use the /vagrant folder
 Don't use PHP 5.4 with Drupal 7 or lower
 Make sure APC, or some opcode cache, is installed
 Provide lots of RAM, at least 1GB
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12.  Run everything off of your local machine!
 Great if you can do it, I like vagrant better
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13. @grmpyprogrammer will track you down if you don’t
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14. Automatically making sure your code works
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15.  Write your tests before you code
 Watch it fail
 Write code to make your tests pass
 Feel better
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16.  Drupal ships with SimpleTest baked in
 Supports unit testing and functional testing
 Unit tests are done by extending
DrupalUnitTestCase
 Functional tests are done by extending
DrupalWebTestCase
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18.  Unit tests do not bootstrap Drupal, so are
very quick
 FunctionalTests bootstrap Drupal, so are very
slow
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19.  The test runner is AJAX, so it can break very
easily
 Debugging can be hard since extra output
breaks the test runner, and since the DB is
destroyed watchdog() is useless
 You can use $this->verbose(‘message’) or
debug(‘message’) though
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20. Your command line friend
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21. Dump your database to an SQL file
$ drush sql-dump --result-file=/PATH/TO/dump.sql
Back up the entire site to a tarball
$ drush archive-dump default
View watchdog entries
$ drush watchdog-list
Update Drupal and modules
$ drush pm-update
Download module
$ drush pm-download [module_name]
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22. I couldn’t think of a good tagline that should go here
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23.  Allows you to quickly back up the DB and
move it
 No need to use a DB GUI
 Can do automatic local or remote backups
 Useful for moving databases from one server
to another
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24.  Exposes a lot of the structure of Drupal
 Things like nodes can be clicked through to see
their object structure
 Can auto-generate dummy content
 Better debugging output
 dpm() and dvm() for pretty output
 dpr(), kpr(), and dvr() will dump to the page
header
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25.  Package system for Drupal
 Takes a lot of stuff in the DB and makes it
exportable and portable via code
 Lot of stuff works out of the box, extra
modules like UUID, boxes, and features_extra
pick up the slack
 ftools makes updating features easy
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26. Understand it and harness its power
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27.  Page caching for full output caching
 Block caching so that dynamic content can
still update if it needs to
 You can configure how long to cache things
for
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28.  In Full Page Caching, most of the PHP isn’t
run
 Effectively turns your site into a static site (kind
of)
 With block caching, not all blocks will cache.
What and when to cache is up to the block
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29. It’s kind of like nuclear fusion, but without all the explosions
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30.  Will group needed JS and CSS files
together, reducing the number of HTTP
requests
 Will minify CSS, reducing some of the
transmission size
YOU have to make your modules take
advantage of it, though
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31.  Let Drupal know about your files
 drupal_add_js()
 drupal_add_css()
 Add the files to your .info file
 Don’t just add JS and CSS files via <script>
and <style> tags in your theme
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32. Really, ask.
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33.  Acquia Dev Desktop
 vagrant
 Drupal SimpleTest
 drush
 Backup and Migrate
 Devel
 Features
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E-mail: chris@ctankersley.com
Twitter: @dragonmantank
App.net: @ctankersley
https://joind.in/8153