Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment (DrupalCon 2009 Notes)

25 Tips for Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment
Sacha Chua

Full Session Notes on Sacha's blog

meta

1. Be lazy
   • write tools to save (future) work
2. Learn from others
3. Know your tools inside-out
   • read your tools' documentation
   • read your tools' source code!
4. Know what's out there
   • read through Drupal modules listings
5. Practice relentless improvement
   • review thoughts about your processes
   • think about what you hate, and how you can improve that

Browser tips and plugins (firefox)

1. Firebug
2. firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote
3. Tamper Data
4. iMacros
5. Drupal for Firebug

Drupal modules

1. Admin Menu
2. Devel
   • check out SMTP facade tool
3. SimpleTest
4. Login Toboggan
5. XDebug

Source code and configuration management

1. Check in your entire source tree
2. Organize your source code
3. Check-in clean source for third-party modules
4. Test all upgrades against a production copy
5. Manage your branches and merge changes

Automation and regression testing

1. Use build tools
   • make, ant...
   • define a common set of commands, and have config/setup variables on the back-end
   • allow yourself to forget SQL commands, URLs, passwords...
   • Makefile targets:
     make mysql     connect to the database
     make backup     make a copy of the database
     make backup-partial     make a partial copy of the database, omitting accesslog data and other unnecessary information
     make restore     restore the database from the backup
     make dev-restore     restore the database from the backup, and enable all the development modules
     make clearcache     restore the database from the backup
     make tags     restore the database from the backup
     make doc     restore the database from the backup
     make test     run all my project-specific tests
2. Learn or make tools to save yourself work
3. Drush - the Drupal Shell
4. Simpletest
   test code AND webpages

From the audience

• Vimperator
• Virtual Document Root: svn checkout in a particular directory
• geben: XDebug with emacs
• unfuddle hosted svn and git SCM
• Trace module: trace hooks and timing
• groups.drupal.org/Drubuntu
• Coder module: Developer Module that assists with code review and version upgrade.
• Sun NetBeans
• CustomError for handling 403s/404s (as LoginToboggan alternative)
• Creating aliases for drush for different projects?
  Drush will become less of a module...
• make sure development modules don't end up on live sites!
  use sites/localhost for development modules
  insert notification to warn you if they are installed
• install profiles
• for searching modules: don't google! check out all of contrib and do a recursive grep across it.
• aegir - hostmaster evolved