Migrating the Wieting Site in Drupal 8

Sorry for my extended absence here, I’ve been uber-busy with work, but have also been able to work a little (lots of long nights and weekends) on a long-overdue update of https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com in Drupal 8. It’s true, I have been thinking about moving that site to make it static, almost certainly using Hugo, but I thought before doing so I’d give Drupal 8 one more try. I’m pleased to report that it’s working nicely again. Here’s how I did it, and how I plan to keep it updated…

Saved by “docker-compose-drupal”

I actually started the process of migrating and updating the Wieting website in Docksal, but I failed… I could never figure out how to reliably and easily push my work to production from there. Docksal just seems to wrap so much of itself into the cli container that drives it, I found it difficult to de-couple from that in production.

So I went looking elsewhere and discovered Lando, and I did considerable work with it because Lando, at least in the case of Drupal, builds a 3-part development stack that looks a lot like what I wanted to deploy in production. The parts of a Lando stack, and my production stack, are the same:

• An nginx web server container,
• A mysql or mariadb database container, and
• A php codebase container.

But once again I had trouble figuring out exactly how to push that development stack to production. So, I went looking again for an open (and by that I mean “free” and freely modifiable) production-ready stack configuration that uses the 3-parts I had in mind. I found docker-compose-drupal and almost immediately created my own fork of that project. Using my docker-compose-drupal fork I set off to build a production instance, NOT a development instance, on my summitt-dweller-DO-docker droplet at DigitalOcean. That project came to life in /opt/docker-compose-drupal there.

The evolution of summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/docker-compose-drupal was quite an adventure, in large part because the Wieting’s web site had gone almost a year without any updates. That meant upgrading the Drupal core from version 8.2.? to version 8.8.2, along with countless modules that had changed rather dramatically, so there were lots of bumps along the way. I also had to move the site from a multi-site configuration, the old site lived in a container at /var/www/html/web/sites/wieting, to a default configuration that lives in the container at /var/www/localhost/web/sites/default.

Fortunately, docker-compose-drupal includes some nice scripts and features to help with things like that, and they are nicely documented in the project’s README.md file. I’ll elaborate on a few of the key features later in this post, but most of what I did during the migration and update is water-under-the-bridge, and should not need to be repeated, ever, so I won’t elaborate on all of it here. It’s worth noting here that the work I did in my fork all happened in a branch named wieting.

Moved to “wieting-D8-DO”

Once I had a new site working as I’d hoped, I wanted to begin a fresh new development and update cycle, so I used a process I’ve documented in my work blog: “How to Create a New GitHub Repo from an Existing Branch”. That work created the Wieting site’s new home, https://github.com/SummittDweller/wieting-D8-DO, based on the wieting branch of the aforementioned fork of docker-compose-drupal.

Site Update Workflow

Having built the wieting-D8-DO project I need a reliable workflow that I could use to keep it up-to-date. I created that workflow by migrating the existing production site at summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/docker-compose-drupal, where it responded as https://Wieting.TamaToledo.org, to a new staging copy at summitt-dweller-DO-docker:/opt/wieting-D8-DO, where it would respond, temporarily, at my designated “staging” address, https://Wieting.SummittServices.com.

While working as administrator on summitt-dweller-DO-docker the entire command-line process looked like this:

echo $(date --iso-8601)cd /opt/docker-compose-drupalgit ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard > $(date --iso-8601).ignored.listtar czvf $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gz --files-from $(date --iso-8601).ignored.listgpg --encrypt --recipient [email protected] $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gzrm -fr $(date --iso-8601).ignored.list.tar.gzcd /optgit clone https://github.com/SummittDweller/wieting-D8-DO.gitcd wieting-D8-DOcp -f ../docker-compose-drupal/2020-02-27.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg .gpg --decrypt 2020-02-27.ignored.list.tar.gz.gpg > ignored.tar.gztar xzvf ignored.tar.gzrm -f ignored.tar.gzcd ../docker-compose-drupalscripts/mysql dumpmv -f database/dump/dump.sql /opt/wieting-D8-DO/database/mysql-initcd /opt/wieting-D8-DOnano .envnano docker-compose.ymldocker-compose up -d

Breaking the Workflow Down

Moving the site from /opt/docker-compose-drupal and https://Wieting.TamaToledo.com, to /opt/wieting-D8-DO and https://Wieting.SummittServices.com is a command-line process like this, with comments…

That worked nicely! Time to end this saga, but I’ll return shortly, in another post, to document my workflow for ongoing maintenance and updates. Until next time…