Goal
Learn how to configure an Acquia’s Code Studio build process to trigger a build in another project. This would include pulling in a custom module, external library, distribution profile or an Acquia Site Factory External Theme.
Prerequisites
- Basic knowledge of Drupal development
- Acquia’s Code Studio build process
- Composer / Drupal-Scaffold
- Acquia Cloud
Overview
Acquia’s comprehensive Drupal development toolchain is geared towards best practice Drupal DevOps, and empowers users to customize the DevOps process to fit their business and technology needs in order to scale as projects and teams evolve.
In this tutorial, I want to show how to have one Code Studio project trigger another or many Code Studio projects to run builds and deploy to the Cloud. I can think of many use-cases where this would be handy. Here are a couple.
- Custom Drupal Modules - Use Code Studio to host your custom module repositories and trigger builds to your Drupal sites and pull in the latest version of the Custom Module whenever a branch is merged into the primary branch.
- External Component Libraries - Similar to above, host your external component library in a Code Studio project and trigger the latest build to deploy to all your other Code Studio projects. This works great when using Acquia’s Site Studio and an external library.
- Drupal Distribution - Deploy a distribution to multiple Drupal sites, auto deploying Security and Code Updates.
- Acquia Site Factory External Themes - ACSF has the ability to pull in external theme repositories. Use Code Studio to host and test the themes prior to getting merged into the site repository. This also gives you more flexibility to restrict the design team from accessing the Drupal repository.
I was inspired by Dries Buytaert's recent blog ‘The evolution of Drupal's composability: from the command line to the browser’, I wanted to break down this statement “explore how Drupal's composability is evolving to empower ambitious site builders with modern, no-code development practices.” to find other ways to make my projects more composible.
Composability is a design principle that allows systems to be assembled from smaller, independent components. This makes it easier to create new systems by combining existing components.
Code Studio adds another layer to the concept of composability on Acquia’s full stack Drupal development platform. Based on Gitlab, Code Studio is a fully managed CI/CD pipeline optimized for Drupal that enables your teams to plan, build, test, review, and deploy from a single, customizable workflow that integrates with Acquia Cloud or Site Factory Platforms. Just by adding a .gitlab-ci.yml file and changing one setting to customize Acquia's out-of-the-box workflow / build-process. They make it easy to customize and add your own steps, jobs or tasks to your projects build process.
Using this concept, you can separate all your projects into different Code Studio projects with their own git repositories / history, their own customized build process, running their own tests in the CI and then triggering a release. This should save time, give move flexibility on who has access to what and add major value to the overall DevOps architecture.
Steps
In this example, we’ll use a simple custom drupal module and the concept of adding an external module to your site or many sites.
The idea would be that when you update your Drupal custom module code, that should trigger any Drupal Code project you have defined to build, pull in the latest version of your module defined in your composer file and release the new version to the Cloud.
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Start with a working project Drupal project using Code Studio
First we need a working Code Studio project with Drupal installed and configured to deploy to the Acquia Cloud. If you have not yet, follow these instructions - How to set up a new project in Code Studio, using a Cloud IDE.
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Customize the build with your own .gitlab-ci.yml file
In order to customize the build process, we will need to make a new .gitlab-ci.yml file and make one change in the settings.
Add the following to your .gitlab-ci.yml file
include: - project: 'acquia/standard-template' file: - '/gitlab-ci/Auto-DevOps.acquia.gitlab-ci.yml'stages: - Build Drupal - Test Drupal - Deploy Drupal - Automatic Updates"Build Code": after_script: - printf "The Build Code stage is complete."In /-/settings/ci_cd, General Pipelines and CI/CD configuration file, change this to the name of your new file, ‘.gitlab-ci.yml ’
Conclusion
Using the steps above as a concept, the sky's the limit. Replace the custom module with a component library, a whole drupal distribution or multiple Site Factory external themes.
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