ATTACK of the CLIs!

I’m in the middle of several Drupal Camp / Con’s (any event over 1000 people is no longer a “Camp” but that’s for another time) and it’s occured to me: I can no longer learn by going. Now, this is learn in the traditional sense of what I used to go to Camps for (been coming to camps for 8 years now).

It’s not that I’m advanced beyond younger me, it’s that this ecosystem is an endless rabbit hole of buzz words, frameworks, CLIs, VMs, architectural components, issue queues, PRs, and other words that must make most anyone new to anything web immediately freak out and hide. And so, in coming to events I feel I rarely get to learn about implementing BEM or SASS or DrupalConsole or Composer or Dependency Injection because 1 hour or 50 minutes for a talk isn’t close to enough to scratch the surface of these concepts.

What IS important thought at Camp sessions:

1. Community; hearing from peers and discovering together how much all of us don’t know everything
2. Learning new buzz words, which is critical because I don’t know what to Google!

For example, I assumed everyone already knew what Drupal Console was only to find out that most people I talk to go “Duh-huh-waaaa?”. And so, to heep some more Buzz words on you all from the Camp circuit and why I’m so excited for them :)

Drush

Drush is the original command-line Drupal (you’ll see why I frame it that way soon). It allows you to communicate with your drupal site via commandline, issue commands, routinize boring tasks and do complex scary tasks as single commands. Other modules can supply plugins for this as well as anything you’d like to just use as a plugin without modules.

Drupal Console

Drupal Console is a bit of the new kid on the block. It originally was met with resistance, as it’s another CLI for Drupal, but has since started to find its place in the early D8 CLI communities that are developing. What’s cool about Drupal Console is that it’s starting to find a happy middle ground of coverage for things that Drush kind of was weak at. What else is cool, is that these communities are working together to reduce overlap in capability AND (more importantly) allow for each to call the other natively. This means you’ll be able to start execution threads like `drush drupal-console ….` or `drupal drush en views`.

Console doesn’t have support for running off and grabbing Views. It’s much more of the architecture of building out things that you need to work with your drupal site, but without writing all the code (for example). Think of it more as a utility to help you work with Drupal in the development side of the house. While Drush has plugins for things like module building, code review and entity scaffolding, they were never its strong suit. This is where Drupal Console is focusing its efforts.

Drupal Console also has Symfony based plugins since it’s building against Symfony Console. Drush on the otherhand is your traditional Drupal architecture, supporting multiple versions of Drupal, etc.

Why you should care

Because if this PR / thread in Drush-ops moves forward, it would mean the two could call each other. This will allow for two different ways of developing for CLI devs, pulling in Symfony components, or traditional drupal guts. It also gets you a bigger community working on things at the low level so that stuff at the high level (site building, theming, etc) is easier and more scriptable. With Drush you’ll (still) be able to build make files and get all the dependencies for your site and with Console you’ll be able to write new modules and sub-themes a lot faster because of the templating / file trees that it will allow you to build.

As we get towards a stable D8, Drush and Drupal Console, we’ll have so much raw HP under the hood that you’ll be able to automate all kinds of things. It also means these communities can tackle different sides of the under the hood problem space for getting Drupal going.

For example; I maintain Drush Recipes which allows for tokenized drush chaining. This lets drush call itself and via arguements you get a lot of stuff done without much effort. Jesus Olivas just made me aware that there’s some Command Chaining being worked on for Drupal Console. This way you could string together commands in Console (allowing console to call itself basically) that allows you to get something more functional / end-result then having to manually type the same kinds of commands over and over (he gives an example in the blog post).

The future Drupal Development environment / workflow

Here’s a few projects that if they merge efforts even a little bit in capabilities over the next year or so, you’ll see some insane things start to get automated and working with Drupal will make anything else look painful by comparison (again, looking ahead, right now… yowza!).

• Drush
• Drush Recipes
• Drupal Console / Command-Chaining
• DrupalVM or TerraOps (somewhere in there)
• The Post setup Question and answer bash of Nittany Vagrant

What this would give you workflow wise:

• An Ansible / YML based provisioning of a server, netting all dependencies for D8, Console, Drush, etc
• You could login and be presented w/ a prompting like Nittany Vagrant provides, asking what kind of site you want to build
• With even minimal logic to the script (yes I’d like a Drupal site that’s for commerce for example), we could issue a drush recipe that…
• Runs a make file, si minimal’s itself, grabs dependencies if they weren’t in the make file, set variables and import default configuration from features to make the OOTB “distribution” a rock solid starting point for anyone to build off of.

Then we’d ask other question. Like “What’s the name of this client”. Answering something like “bigbank” would allow..

• Drush Recipes to tokenize the input of Drush to call Drupal Console
• Console would then be told “Hey, we need to build a new module called bigbank_custom_paygateway, bigbank_helper, and bigbank_theme” create all the components for the types of custom modules that we all use on every deployment with anyone
• Then enable these modules in the new site

Eventually we can get into automatic sub-theme creation, asking what kind of theme you want to base off of (zurb, bootstrap, mothership, custom, etc) and automate a lot of the setup in that area too. We could probably get to the point to w/ theming where you can ask Drupal Console for the template files (defaults obviously) that you want so that it generates those too.

The future is going to get so insane (buzz words wize) we’ll need to keep investing in automation just to keep up. We’ll tell each other to just download XYZ and run through the workflow; there will be no more “hey go get all these dependencies and…” no, things will just be, awesome!

Now, create a PuPHPet style interface that builds the YML customizations (Or maybe like this thing), asks the crappy bash questions, and tokenizes everything downstream… stuff that system in a simple Drupal site and hand it to a Project Manager to kick off a new build.. and THEY’VE started building the site. True empowerment and liberation of workflows is upon us. Now let’s all go drink coffee!