Leverage the ease of Lando, Platform.sh, GitHub and Travis to quickly spin up an ultra pro workflow

At Tandem we are super serious about designing (and using) best-practice development worklows that:

  • Use build processes
  • Allow many developers to easily collaborate
  • Are consistent from project to project
  • Facilitate peer code review
  • Automatically spin up QA environments for manual testing
  • Automate common linting, code standard, unit and functional tests
  • Provide some automated mechanism for deployment to production
  • Deploy changes to production often

Good workflows that do the above almost always provide substantial time (read: $$$) savings during development. Not to mention they also produce a less frustrating collaborative experience for developers.

Of course, the downside of implementing these complex workflows is that they themselves also take a considerable amount of time to set up. Good automation and tight integration between disparate systems ain't easy, or cheap.

That's why we've developed a couple of easy-to-get-rolling ways to kickstart your dev workflow, including a killer one for Drupal 8 that uses:

You can jump straight to the full example now, or continue reading these step-by-step instructions on how to get yourself spun up on this awesome dev workflow.

# What You'll Need

Before you kick off, you'll need to make sure you have a few things:

  1. Lando installed
  2. A GitHub account (ideally with your SSH key(s) added)
  3. A Platform.sh account with your SSH key(s) added
  4. A Travis CI account
  5. (Optional) Git installed *
  6. (Optional) ZenHub for Kanban style issue management in GitHub

It is also definitely worth reading about the upstream starter kit and accompanying documentation on using Lando with Platform.sh.

  • If you don't want to (or can't) install git separately, you can edit the tooling section of your .lando.yml that contains the git routes. If you do this, you can then run git commands using lando git, no other installation necessary.

# Getting Started

# 1. Setup GitHub

Visit this start state on GitHub and fork the project to your own organization or account. Then git clone the repo, and cd into it.

git clone https://github.com/thinktandem/platformsh-example-drupal8.git MYSITENAME
cd MYSITENAME

Keep this terminal window active because you are going to need to need it for subsequent steps.

# 2. Setup Platform.sh

Login to Platform.sh and create a new project through the Platform.sh user interface. After naming your site select "Import your existing code". Then follow the instructions on the next slide to import your forked repository. It should be something like this:

# Add Platform's git repo as a remote, replacing "PLATFORMID" with the ID from your own platform's `git clone` command.
git remote add platform PLATFORMID@git.us.platform.sh:PLATFORMID.git

# Push your GitHub repo to Platform.
git push -u platform master

# Optionally, remove the Platform remote so that you do not accidentally deploy from local to production!
git remote remove platform

At this point it's probably a good idea to browse your site on Platform.sh and go through the Drupal 8 installation process to get your DB dialed in.

# 3. Start up Lando locally, then connect Platform.sh with GitHub

# Lando

Let's start by spinning up a local copy of our Platform.sh site with Lando.

This should spin up the services to run your app (eg php, nginx, mariabdb) and the tools you'll need to begin developing (eg platform cli, drush, composer, drupal console). This command will automatically download and install a bunch of dependencies the first time you run it, but when it is done you should end up with some vanity URLs you can use to visit your new local site.

cd /path/to/my/repo
lando start

If you are interested in tweaking your setup check out the comments in your app's .lando.yml. Or you can augment your Lando spin up with additional services or tools by checking out the advanced Lando docs.

# Login to Platform

Now that you've got your Platform.sh site rolling locally with Lando let's login to Platform.sh using the platform cli that Lando installed for you.

# This should prompt you for a username and password
lando platform

# Verify the login
lando platform auth:info

# Get the ID for your site
# Copy this somewhere for now so you can use it when you comment
# Replace "Workflow Demo" with what you named your site in Step 2.
# Your site ID will be the string between the first set of pipes
lando platform projects | grep "Workflow Demo"

# Connect to GitHub

Use the Platform.sh PROJECT_ID you grabbed in the step above and go through the setup documented here.

lando platform integration:add \
  --type=github \
  --project=PROJECT_ID \
  --token=GITHUB-USER-TOKEN \
  --repository=USER/REPOSITORY \
  --build-pull-requests=true \
  --fetch-branches=true

Once you paste the webhook url into GitHub, your Platform.sh instance will track against your GitHub repo.

CAUTION, THIS MEANS THAT YOUR MASTER BRANCH IS NOW DEPLOYABLE!!!.

As a result, it is an EXTREMELY GOOD IDEA to enable branch protection for your master branch so that people cannot merge to it directly unless appropriate status checks have passed.

# Optionally Pull DB to Local

You can also import your Platform.sh DB locally:

# Use the platform.sh CLI to export your database
cd /path/to/repo/root
lando platform db:dump --gzip --file=dump.sql.gz --project=PROJECT_ID --environment=master

# Import the DB with Lando
lando db-import dump.sql.gz

# Remove the DB dump to be safe
rm -f dump.sql.gz

If you refresh your local site you should now see what you see on your Platform.sh instance.

# 4. Setup Travis CI

You will want to start by doing Steps 1 and 2 in the Travis getting started docs. We already have a pre-baked .travis.yml file for you so you don't need to worry about that unless you want to tweak it.

Then you will want to visit your Platform.sh account settings page and generate an API Token. Make sure you copy the token for the next step because you will only see it once!

Finally, set the following environment variable via the Travis UI.

PLATFORMSH_CLI_TOKEN=TOKEN_YOU_GENERATED
PLATFORMSH_PROJECT_ID=PROJECT_ID (the same id you used for previous steps)

# Trying Things Out

Let's go through a GitHub flow example!

This is a trivial example which deploys all merges into the master branch to the production environment. You can configure more complicated workflows (eg a dev and/or test environment) when you spin up your Platform.sh site but we think this configuration helps maximize continuous delivery.

# 1. Set up a topic branch

# Go into the repo
cd /path/to/my/github/repo

# Checkout master and retrieve the latest and greatest
git checkout master
git pull origin master

# Spin up a well named topic branch eg ISSUE_NUMBER-DESCRIPTION
git checkout -b 123-fixes-that-thing

# 2. Do the dev, commit and push the codes

# Do some awesome dev

# Git commit with a message that matches the issue number
git add -A
git commit -m "#123: Describing what I did to fix that thing."

# Push the branch to GitHub
git push origin 123-fixes-that-thing
  • Check out the Lando Reference section below for some tips on how to run tests before you push. This can save a lot of time and reduce the potential shame you feel for getting bounced by the automated QA and having to make a second commit enshrining your failure.

# 3. Open a PR and do manual and automated testing

Begin by opening a pull request. This will trigger the spin up of a QA environment for manual testing and a Travis build for automated testing.

Here is an example PR with:

# 4. Deploy

When you are satisfied with the above, and any additional QA steps like manual code review you can merge the pull request. This will deploy the feature to production.

# Lando Reference

You should definitely check out the Lando docs for a full sweep on its capabilities, but here are some helpers for this particular config. YOU PROBABLY WANT TO LANDO START YOUR APP BEFORE YOU DO MOST OF THESE THINGS.

Unless otherwise indicated, these should all be run from your repo root (eg the directory that contains the .lando.yml for your site).

# Generic Ccommands

# List all available Lando commands for this app
lando

# Start my site
lando start

# Stop my site
lando stop

# Restart my site
lando restart

# Get important connection info
lando info

# Other helpful things
# Rebuild all containers and build process steps
lando rebuild
# Destroy the containers and tools for this app
lando destroy
# Get info on Lando service logs
lando logs
# Get a publically accessible URL. (Run `lando info` to see the proper localhost address)
lando share -u http://localhost:32813
# "SSH" into the appserver
lando ssh

# Run help to get more info
lando ssh -- --help

# Development commands

# Run Composer things
lando composer install
lando composer update

# Run PHP things
lando php -v
lando php -i

# Run Drush commands (replace "web" if you've moved your webroot to a different subdirectory)
cd web
lando drush status
lando drush cr

# Run Drupal Console commands (replace "web" if you've moved your webroot to a different subdirectory)
cd web
lando drupal

# Testing commands

# Lint your code
lando phplint

# Run PHPCS commands
lando phpcs
# Check drupal code standards
lando phpcs --config-set installed_paths /app/vendor/drupal/coder/coder_sniffer
lando phpcs -n --report=full --standard=Drupal --ignore=*.tpl.php --extensions=install,module,php,inc web/modules web/themes web/profiles

# Run PHPunit commands (replace "web" if you've moved your webroot to a different subdirectory)
cd web
lando phpunit

# Run some PHPunit tests
lando phpunit -c core --testsuite unit --exclude-group Composer

# Run Behat commands
lando behat

# Run some Behat tests
lando behat --config=/app/tests/behat-lando.yml

# Platform.sh commands

# List Platform commands
lando platform list

# Login to Platform
lando platform login

# Import a database from master
lando platform db:dump --gzip --file=dump.sql.gz --project=PROJECT_ID --environment=master
lando db-import dump.sql.gz
rm -f dump.sql.gz