DrupalCamp Ottawa 2019: Automate All the Things

1 minute read Published: 24 Oct, 2019 Author: Christopher Gervais

On Friday, October 18th, I presented at DrupalCamp Ottawa 2019. That’s the annual gathering of the Drupal community in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Session information:

Ever heard of infrastructure-as-code? The idea is basically to use tools like Ansible or Terraform to manage the composition and operation of your cloud systems. This allows infrastructure to be treated just like any other software system. The code can be committed into Git which allows auditability, and reproducibility. It …

Exposing Drupal's Taxonomy Data on the Semantic Web

5 minute read Published: 24 Oct, 2019 Author: Colan Schwartz

As a content management framework, Drupal provides strong support for its taxonomical subsystem for classifying data. It would be great if such data could be exposed via the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) standard for publishing vocabularies as linked data. As Drupal becomes used more and more as a back-end data store (due to features such as built-in support for JSON:API), presenting this data in standard ways becomes especially important.

So is this actually possible now? If …

Drupal 8 hook_update() Tricks

9 minute read Published: 8 Oct, 2019 Author: Derek Laventure

In Drupal 7, hook_update()/hook_install() were well-established mechanisms for manipulating the database when installing a new site or updating an existing one. Most of these routines ended up directly running SQL against the database, where all kinds of state, configuration, and content data lived. This worked reasonably well if you were careful and had a good knowledge of how the database schema fit together, but things tended to get complicated.

With the maturing of Features module, we were …

Aegir DevOps: Deployment Workflows for Drupal Sites

4 minute read Published: 24 Sep, 2019 Author: Colan Schwartz

Aegir is often seen as a stand-alone application lifecycle management (ALM) system for hosting and managing Drupal sites. In the enterprise context, however, it’s necessary to provide mutiple deployment environments for quality assurance (QA), development or other purposes. Aegir trivializes this process by allowing sites to easily be copied from one environment to another in a point-and-click fashion from the Web front-end, eliminating the need for command-line DevOps tasks, which it …

Try Aegir now with the new Dev VM

3 minute read Published: 9 Sep, 2019 Author: Colan Schwartz

Have you been looking for a self-hosted solution for hosting and managing Drupal sites? Would you like be able able to upgrade all of your sites at once with a single button click? Are you tired of dealing with all of the proprietary Drupal hosting providers that won’t let you customize your set-up? Wouldn’t it be nice if all of your sites had free automatically-updating HTTPS certificates? You probably know that Aegir can do all of this, but it’s now trivial to set up a …