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Drupal Flight Control: A brief introduction to it's potential

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What ?!

Last year we built this tool called Drupal Flight Control. You might think “Flight ?? Control ?? Like … air balloons and zeppelins ??” Nope, it gets you in control of your Drupal projects, it’s servers and your whole DTAP environment.

Let’s have a quick walkthrough…

Some background

Lots of companies - not just the smaller ones! - still tend to keep their deployment and release process a manually performed task, which might just ruin your friday afternoon, when you should be drinking your beer.

At Finalist we had this problem in the past. Most of us are developers; we want to develop, not deploy. In my experience, a developer is not a sysadmin - like a guitarist will never be a bass-player, even if they think they are - , nor on the same level of OS and hosting knowledge. This probably means you do your deploys in one of these ways: * Ask your sysadmin to deploy your stuff, wait for it, and tell your project manager or customer to have a look. This won’t allow you to deploy any time you want. * Deploy yourself. This will frustrate the sysadmin because you are a developer … and developers forget about filemodes, ACL’s, nice vhost redirects, good backups etc etc.

To solve this problem, Flightcontrol was created. It deploys for you in a few clicks, just from the dashboard. Want to use DTAP ? Just make a snapshot, and restore it to your test environment.

Have a look below to read about it’s features and potential.

What it really is

Flightcontrol is just a Drupal 7 distribution (Drupal packed with a couple of modules and some configuration), providing you with a dashboard, ready to use just after you installed it.

You don’t need to do lots of creepy tutorial-installation-yum-what-stuff, and since you’re probably a Drupal developer yourself, this should be installed in a breeze.

This tiny beast can be installed on any Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS or other GNU/Linux machine, and only needs some basic PHP and OS packages. After that, provide Flightcontrol with some Bitbucket credentials (other git systems are supported as well), create a new client, project and environment, and you’ll be ready to do your funky stuff.

Most important features

These are by far the most important features, just working out of the box: * Easy installation * Drupal nodes, Drupal views, Drupal anything * Visual dashboard containing your customers and projects * Real-time list of commits or tags when you will make your deploy * Backup of database and/or files (multi-sites supported) * Auto-rollback in case of deploy failure * Snapshot restoring on any environment in the same project (DTAP? PATD? PTAD?) * Support for Bitbucket, Github, Stash, GitLab and more to come

Get involved!

Yes, we would love to see you around on the project page and the issue queue ! We heavily depend on your input, testing and feedback, but also on your commitment as a community developer, by helping us implementing new features and fixes.

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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