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Lando and Drumkit for Drupal 8 Localdev

6 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure
Drupal Planet , Drupal , Lando , Drumkit

Over the last 2 or 3 years, the Drupal community has been converging around a solid set of Docker-based workflows to manage local development environments, and there are a number of worthy tools that make life easier.

My personal favourite is Lando, not only because of the Star Wars geekery, but also because it makes easy things easy and hard things possible (a lot like Drupal). I appreciate that a “standard” Lando config file is only a few lines long, but that it’s relatively easy to configure and customize a much more complex setup by simply adding the appropriate lines to the config.

In this post I want to focus on an additional tool I’ve come to lean on heavily that complements Lando quite nicely, and that ultimately boils down to good ol’ fashioned Makefiles. Last summer at DrupalNorth I gave a talk that was primarily about the benefits of Lando, and I only mentioned Drumkit in passing. Here I want to illustrate in more detail how and why this collection of Makefile tools is a valuable addition to my localdev toolbox.

The key benefits provided by adding a Drumkit environment are:

  • consistent make <target>-based workflow to tie various dev tasks together
  • ease onboarding of new devs (make help)
  • make multistep tasks easier (make tests)
  • make tasks in Lando or CI environment the same (ie. make install && make tests)

Drumkit is not just for Drupal!

This example is using Drumkit for a Drupal 8 localdev environment, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use it for other purposes (and in fact, we at Consensus have lately been doing just that.

Basic Setup

As an example, suppose you’re setting up a new D8 project from scratch. Following this slide from my Lando talk, you would do the basic Lando D8 project steps:

  1. Create codebase with Composer (composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev code --stability dev --no-interaction)
  2. Initialize Git repository (git init etc.)
  3. Initialize Lando (lando init)

For now, leave out the lando start step, which we’ll let Drumkit handle momentarily. We should also customize the .lando.yml a little with custom database credentials, which we’ll tell Drumkit about later. Append the following to your .lando.yml:

services:
  database:
    creds:
      user: chewie_dbuser
      password: chewie_dbpass
      database: chewie_db

Add Drumkit

To insert Drumkit into this setup, we add it as a git submodule to our project using the helper install.sh script, and bootstrap Drumkit:

wget -O - https://gitlab.com/consensus.enterprises/drumkit/raw/master/scripts/install.sh | /bin/bash
. d  # Use 'source d' if you're not using Bash

The install script checks that you are in the root of a git repository, and pulls in Drumkit as a submodule, then initializes a top-level Makefile for you.

Finally, we initialize the Drumkit environment, by sourcing the d script (itself a symlink to .mk/drumkit) into our shell.

Drumkit modifies the (shell) environment!

Note that Drumkit will modify your PATH and BIN_PATH variables to add the project-specific .mk/.local/bin directory, which is where Drumkit installs any tools you request (eg. with make selenium. This means if you have multiple Drumkit-enabled projects on the go, you’re best to work on them in separate shell instances, to keep these environment variables distinct.

Note that you can take advantage of this environment-specific setup to customize the bootstrap script to (for example) inject project credentials for external services into the shell environment. Typically we would achieve this by creating a scripts/bootstrap.sh that in turn calls the main .mk/drumkit, and re-point the d symlink there.

Set up your kit

Because we’re using Composer to manage our codebase, we also add a COMPOSER_CACHE_DIR environment variable, using the standard .env file, which Drumkit’s stock bootstrap script will pull into your environment:

echo "COMPOSER_CACHE_DIR=tmp/composer-cache/" >> .env
. d # Bootstrap Drumkit again to have this take effect

From here, we can start customizing for Drupal-specific dev with Lando. First, we make a place in our repo for some Makefile snippets to be included:

mkdir -p scripts/makefiles
echo "include scripts/makefiles/*.mk" >> Makefile

Now we can start creating make targets for our project (click the links below to see the file contents in an example Chewie project. For modularity, we create a series of “snippet” makefiles to provide the targets mentioned above:

NB You’ll need to customize the variables.mk file with the DB credentials you set above in your .lando.yml as well as your site name, admin user/password, install profile, etc.

Now our initial workflow to setup the project looks like this:

git clone --recursive <project-repo>
cd <project-repo>
. d # or "source d" if you're not using Bash
make start
make build
make install

This will get a new developer up and running quickly, and can be customized to add whatever project-specific steps are needed along the way.

But wait- it gets even better! If I want to make things really easy on fellow developers (or even just myself), I can consolidate common steps into a single target within the top-level Makefile. For example, append the make all target to your Makefile:

.PHONY: all

all:
        @$(MAKE-QUIET) start
        @$(MAKE-QUIET) build
        @$(MAKE-QUIET) install

Now, the above workflow for a developer getting bootstrapped into the project simplifies down to this:

git clone --recursive <project-repo>
cd <project-repo>
. d
make all

Customize your kit

At this point, you can start adding your own project-specific targets to make common workflow tasks easier. For example, on a recent migration project I was working on, we had a custom Features module (ingredients) that needed to be enabled, and a corresponding migration module (ingredients_migrate) that needed to be enabled before migrations could run.

I created the following make targets to facilitate that workflow:

We often take this further, adding a make tests target to setup and run our test suite, for example. This in turn allows us to automate the build/install/test process within our CI environment, which can call exactly the same make targets as we do locally.

Ultimately, Drumkit is a very simple idea: superimpose a modular Makefile-driven system on top of Lando to provide some syntactic sugar that eases developer workflow, makes consistent targets that CI can use, and consolidates multi-step tasks into a single command.

There’s lots more that Drumkit can do, and plenty of ideas we have yet to implement, so if you like this idea, feel free to jump in and contribute!

The article Lando and Drumkit for Drupal 8 Localdev first appeared on the Consensus Enterprises blog.

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