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Why we’re building our Drupal project on Github

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Developer experience is our primary concern with this Drupal 8 version of doing CRM.

We thought we could improve the experience of helping developers contribute to the project. We noticed that for Drupal 8 all the cool kids were moving to hosting their development to github, such as with Drupal Commerce, but even core bits of Drupal.

So we did some investigating and decided to join them. We thought it would be helpful to share a couple of our thoughts and reasons, we are by no means authorities on this!

Getting Started

Being able to work with Github is really nice. Someone can come along to github and easily fork the main repository which is possible on Drupal.org but much easier on github.

No Special Users

We have a principle where “no individuals is special”. On drupal.org the module maintainers get access to more tools then everyone else. On github everyone is basically the same. In theory someone’s fork may become a bigger deal than the original. This means everyone has the same tools and so the things we do to make lives for our developers easier, everyone else gets to share.

We found that when some developers were maintainers and had access to drupal.org’s git they had a much nicer experience than the people who had to just download the source code or set up their own git experiences.

Pull Requests

Pull Requests are really nice. We think pull requests are pretty much a nicer way of doing patches as you can just click a few buttons and copy and paste it into the issue queue. With Dreditor it is not a big deal but github keeps track of minor changes to a patch much more effectively especially if multiple people are working on it.

  • Although it does require giving others access to my fork of a project and so we have found that sometimes patches are easier
  • Although if multiple people are working on a pull request, they can do it by forking the pull request owner’s repository and do a pull request with that first!

Drupal.org

We definitely still use Drupal.org as the issue queue and turn off all of github’s issue tracking features. We then reference issue numbers in as many commits as possible and certainly all pull requests (We post pull requests in their issue).

One of the committers can, every so often push the “main repository” or any repository to the git repo on drupal.org

TravisCI

We also use travis-ci to handle tests and will follow up with a more detailed post about how we handle testing.

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web