An Engagement Manager’s Guide To Site Building In Drupal 8 – Week 04

This week a lot got undone, broken, recovered and then some.

Worked on the product backlog, not quite ready for public consumption yet but getting there, sprint backlog for the week:

• Shop for VPS
• Setup VPS 
• Migrate to VPS
• Fonts – via CSS
• Sort out Contact Form (emails not working)
• Sort our Domain name and DNS stuff (may need an expert’s assistance)
• Backlog grooming – WIP

Acquia Cloud Professional would be nice, would make life much easier, support would be kick ass (and needed) but is out of my budget! time to count the pennies and find a candy store that fits the budget. Bluehost.com or DigitalOcean.com…. went with DigitalOcean, gives an SSD, quite a bit of computing power on a budget, has no developer tools though, will need to get devops help and learn some devops stuff myself (kind’a and kind’a not looking forward to that) but hey you get what you can afford!

• Added an SSH key, instructions easy enough to follow
• Am in as root! (nice!)
• its an Ubuntu VPS, LAMP stack, phpmyadmin installed
• explored setting up DNS and nada – haven’t got time for this, my sprint capacity is significantly reduced this week and possibly the next too! can’t wait, time to call in devops help, Asim enlisted to help set up DNS for agileforpeace.com for the VPS and opensocial.agileforpeace.com for my social transformation site (thank you Asif)
• With not much to do, dived into CSS architecture (for Drupal 8)… 10 mins later… need to find an idiot’s guide to CSS in Drupal!
• Had good wins today, the fear of the terminal is dissipating.

• Need to migrate my site from Acquia Cloud to the new VPS environment.
• Installed backup and migrate, activated it and disaster strikes! backup and migrate broke the site and can not access the extend page to uninstall.

• Looked up uninstall backup_migrate using Drush since I could not access the extend page – nada!
• But if I go to an invalid URL it seems to work but can’t access anything in the admin menu, insanity!

• Tried disabling using Drush (drush dis -y backup_migrate && drush pm-uninstall -y backup_migrate), did not work, tried a bunch of stuff, whatsoever google threw up as candidate solutions.
• Decided to take the simplest option and restored the site from backup on Acquia insight, easy enough.
• I’ll take the small win and call it a day!

• Started day 4 with a nice surprise, my first contribution! wooHoo.. the joy of little things!
• It was a tough start, forgot my admin password again (blistering barnacles)! and remained locked out for the a good part of the timebox! tried a number of suggested means to recover the admin password using Drush, it was one fail after another! eventually reached out to @Dakku for help and it turns out its a pretty simple process!
• Attempted migration from the DB back up – something migrated but not quite, need to figure out what went wrong, the theme didnt quite work even though its Bartik straight out of the box, am beginning to have doubts about maintaining a VPS by myself.

• Am back in but am out of time, more on day 5.

• In terminal type: cd /var/www/html/yoursite.dev/docroot/sites/default
• Once in the directory, type: /usr/local/bin/drush8 uli
• You will get a return value that looks like: /user/reset/1/1448057351/JY2957SilWctPfNfN1gUQ2bT5lS-NvCwjt3heDqdu5A.
• Copy everything from “/user/….” onwards and paste it after your domain in the address bar in the browser e.g. http://yourdomain.com/user/reset/1/1448057351/JY2957SilWctPfNfN1gUQ2bT5l...
• Go to that url, this is a one off password change process, you can reset your admin password.

Decision time! I can spend time building my site in D8 with dev tools to support me (on Acquia Cloud) or I can build without them and pick up needed devops skills to manage my VPS; time being the deciding factor am ditching the VPS route and will continue with Acquia Cloud, as for affordability found out as an Acquian I get an environment as an employee benefit! wooHoo! Though it seems this week was not as productive but got a couple of nice wins and picked up some more Drush (the fear of the terminal is dissipating! BTW DrushCommands.com is a pretty epic resource).
Retro time

• Shop for VPS
• Setup VPS –
• Migrate to VPS (theme isn’t working)
• Fonts – via CSS
• Sort out Contact Form (so that it sends out emails)
• Sort our Domain name and DNS stuff (may need a subject matter expert to assist)
• Backlog grooming – WIP

Having decided to stay on Acquia Cloud I can focus on the site backlog in week 5, (mental note: need to pick up the MVP backlog items soonish).

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