I'm a proponent of automation, so when I find myself running the same commands over and over I always look for a way of wrapping that in an alias or script.
I spend a lot of my day to day job in the command line and I realised today that I must have typed 'git status' for the millionth time and wondered what my most commonly used commands were. So I found a stack overflow post showing my most used commands in a nice little bash one liner.
I have been adding to my custom Deployer scripts for a number of months and I have now been using it to do more than just deploy my sites. Since it acts as a connection to my website server I have been using Deployer to perform other tasks like creating backups and clearing Drupal caches without having to log into the server to do it. What has helped me here is that I have set out my deployment tasks in a very modular fashion, so although my deployment runs a database backup, I there is nothing to stop me running the database backup command on it's own without doing a full deployment.
So far in this series of posts we have looked at detecting key presses from the user and creating a game of tic tac toe using PHP and the command line. The next step is to create a game that has graphics and real time user input. As we are using the command line we don't have much space to work with so the graphics we create aren't going to be very detailed. The simplest action game I could think of is snake. It has a few simple rules, can have very basic graphics and doesn't involve any physics or other mechanics that would effect the game as a whole. In fact the game snake dates back to the 1976 game Blockade, which was created using just text strings.
Following on from my last post about creating a command line game in PHP we now have a mechanism to listen to keypresses. The next step from here is to create a simple game. After thinking about a game that would fit into the command line I decided that something simple like tic tac toe (also called noughts and crosses) would be a good starting point. The game board is small and the conditions for winning are pretty simple to understand.
I was watching a documentary about old computers on YouTube recently and it showed a video of an early computer game creating using the command line. This wasn't a text based adventure game, but a game creating using text for the graphics running as a program on the command line. This got me thinking that creating something like this should be possible using PHP. If it was possible on a 30 year old computer then surely it's possible to get PHP to do it, right? I thought it might be interesting to create a series of posts showing how to put this together.
You've probably been there before. A Drupal View you are working on looks great and has all the data and fields you need, but when you look a little closer at the results you realise that something is off. After looking at the generated SQL query you see that there is a problem with one of the joins which causes your counts to be off a little. Ultimately, you need to remove this join, but you really need that data included in your results.
Creating a subquery can allow you to pull out data from a specific field without adding another join that would cause the results to be out.
Whilst Twig is a powerful tool in its own right there are occasions when you need to pull out data from Drupal or manipulate it in certain ways. I normally do this using preprocess steps, but I recently found that it was also possible to extend Twig within the Drupal framework to provide your own functions and filters. This can be useful if you have custom templates and need to perform special actions on data items to format them in different ways.
Before we can create Twig filters and functions in Drupal we need to tell Drupal that we have a class that contains them. This is done by creating an entry in the your module services file that contains the tag tag.extension. In a module called "custom_twig" the file would be called custom_twig.services.yml and would contain the following.
PHP8 will be released on November 26th 2020 and there is lots being written about the upcoming features in this release has now been released! As this is a major version there will be new features as well as breaking changes so it's important to be aware of what is changing. This will make it easier to think about how PHP8 will effect your applications and what actions you will need to take to ensure you can upgrade without incident.
I thought I would go through a few of the main changes to see whats going to be in the next PHP release.
A good first step is to look at how to install PHP8 so that you can check it out for yourself. If you are using Ubuntu then the simplest way to install PHP8 is to use the existing ondrej/php PPA library. This can be installed using the following commands.
I like working with DrupalVM and I've worked with Ansible based Vagrant setups for years and so I'm very familiar with it's setup. More than that, I find I have very few problems with running it. I normally run it with Vagrant, but you can run it with Docker if you like.
When starting a new site project I normally add DrupalVM to the codebase so that I can get the site up and running quickly. This is especially useful if something like Solr is involved as setting that up is a pain. I thought I would go through the steps involved in adding DrupalVM to your codebase as it's pretty simple and will get you up and running with a Drupal site in about 10 minutes.
Start out with a Drupal site in a composer setup. I normally run the Drupal recommended composer setup file so that I have a up to date Drupal codebase, so let's do that here.
I've been using composer with Drupal for a few years now and I've picked up a few things along the way that have really helped me out. Following on from my post about the anatomy of the recommended Drupal 9 composer file I thought it would be good to expand on that to present some tips.
Here are 7 tips that will help you out when using composer with Drupal.
One of the most useful things I have found is using composer to manage patches to projects. This is possible using a project called composer-patches. You can require this into your project like this.