Enterprise Drupal Site And Team Management Panel

Enterprise - The Cost of Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Narayan Newton (Server Coordinate for Drupal.org) discussed the challenges of team and site management in an enterprise Drupal environment.

Topics included

• Subversion management of a large Drupal installation, with multiple branches and tags for development and deployment.
• Testing newly developed modules and patches for deployment
• Managing a large distributed team of developers
• Managing Drupal upgrades and specifically an upgrade to Drupal 6.X

The presenters

• Narayan Newton - Tag1Consulting/Drupal.org
• Rohit Anabheri - Waste Management

Index

• Revision control
• Vendor Branching
• Code Deployment
• Shared Filed Directory

August 31 - Drupal.org went down

Why? A change was deployed without communication. The idea to avoid this, and its harder than it looks. Communication is king, that is where the presentation is all about.

Revision Control

The point of Revision Control

• Keep History
• Keep Informed
• Keep The Last Working Copy
• Keep Your Organisationional Knowledge

There is a knowledgebase within every company. If a employer leaves, the knowledge is gone too. With revision control, the knowledge is in the commits.

Revision Control Systems

CVS

• Don't.. just don't

Subversion

• The "new" CVS
• svnmerge.py

TheNextGeneration (git/bzr/mercurial)

• Offline Usage
• Much Better Merging
• git/bz will both serve you extremely well

Vendor Branching

Track your sites history, and the history of your chosen modules/products.

Example

• svn://repo/drupal.org/
  - 5.x
  - 6.x
  - trunk
• svn://repo/views
  - 5.10
  - 6.13
  - trunk

Code Deployment

Manually

• CP or SVN UP

Capistrano

• Can use code to document your process
• Can easily push out sites

Chef/CFengine/Puppet

• Not really designed for this, but can be used
• Hard to trigger

Shared Files Directory

• No need to store drupal site directory entirely on shared storage, you can just store files