burgled

Welcome to the new Drupal @ PSU!

We hope you enjoy the site so much that we want you to have it. No really, go ahead, take it. Steal this site. We did, and we’re proud of that fact. This site is actually a fork of the Office of Digital Learning’s new site that just launched recently.

How did we steal this? Using backup and migrate and having access to the source for the theme, we were able to spin the ODL site up at a new location. From there, we used Drush Recipes to further optimize the site for SEO and performance. Then using Node Export to get a few default pieces of content migrated, Default Config + Features for all the exportables and profiler builder to author the install routine, we have the same site as before but sanitized and fully released to the public (including ourselves)!

This post isn’t just to brag about open sourcing a site though, it’s about how you can now spin this site up really fast (or any other) in PSU DUG’s Nittany Vagrant project. Nittany Vagrant has a few goals that make it unique compared to other Vagrant offerings:

We want to boil our jobs down to answering questions

We all run almost the same series of commands to get started. Drush dl views, ctools, features, admin_menu, jquery_update, etc. So instead of all that, we wanted to come up with a method of helping to standardize site builds to put newbees on the same playing field as long time developers. This has always been a driving force behind the Nittany distribution, but now we’re taking it a step further. Instead of having a traditional install profile, we have a server and site build process that try to get at what you are looking to accomplish.

Right now it asks if you are doing front end development, if you need SEO tools, if you want the base line we recommend, and it even gives you the option of starting your new site build out from the Publicize distribution, drupal from a repo (which could be an install profile at that point) or by ssh binding to a server and pulling it down to work on locally!

We want mirror a RHEL based environment

Most setups you see are Ubuntu / Debian based. That’s great except most of higher education has standardized development on RHEL for long term stability and support (RHEL supports packages for like 20 years or something). Nittany Vagrant is built on top of CentOS 6.5, which is about as similar as you’ll get without paying money.

We wanted a small, clean Vagrant routine

We’ve been burned before by Chef and provisioning scripts in Vagrant. We end up using Chef for Vagrant management and then managing Chef and its cookbooks more then just fixing the small issues that prop up. This time around we wanted to use something as simple as possible for everyone in our community to be able to jump in and help so we stuck with bash, drush and drush recipes to do all the heavy lifting.

It’s already helping get other people involved as we have 6 members of the local PSU DUG community now with commits to the Nittany-Vagrant repo where in the past it was always 1 or 2.

Show me

Here’s a video I recorded showing the current state of Nittany Vagrant as of this writing and what you can do with it now just by answering questions. This is only the begininig though as we want to get into site provisioning and replication, as well as the ability to move this entire process from vagrant to being applied to remote servers (which has already been shown to work on Digital Ocean).