Contributing to Drupal isn't easy, especially when you have busy weeks and finding time seems impossible. Then let's face it, sometimes it takes a lot more to "spin up" the local development environment to work on an issue than to solve the issue itself.
Last year I accidentally discovered the DrupalPod project which, from what is said, has the purpose of significantly simplifying the life of contributors. Well, what about, "love at first sight": when I used to take hours to propose a patch, I can now submit one within 20 minutes, which was completely unthinkable before. I don't have enough words of thanks for Shaal and all the Drupal community that is constantly working on improving the contribution through DrupalPod and the issue fork.
But the story doesn't end there! But what if I used the same idea for my clients' projects?
DrupalPod: Embedding DrupalPod Technology in Clients' Projects
After seeing this webinar at the beginning of the year, I decided this last month to test DrupalPod with a couple of projects I'm working on and here are some of my comments.
Disadvantages:
- it takes a little longer to set up the project because you have to bring all the custom configurations of the project to the "cloud". For example, if you are working on a migration from D7 to D9, you may have to rely on AWS S3 to store databases/files of the old site and make sure that the generated environment contains them;
- I used to use PhpStorm, so find myself a bit awkward with VScode which is integrated by default. But with JetBrains Gateway I can to have PHPStorm as if I were working locally (I have to fix xDebug, but we're almost there);
- to use the infrastructure you must register on GitPod.io which offers you 50h of free hours of use per month. For now it's more than I need, but if I have to adopt this tool for all my projects, I will surely have to think about the paid plan.
Advantages:
- sharing the project with other developers/builders is immediate even if they do not have much experience in creating their own local environment. Once you've signed up to GitPod.io and add your project's branch/commit url to
https://gitpod.io(be it on bitbucket, github, gitlab), booom within a couple of minutes you have the environment ready to work on it; - DrupalPod uses ddev, so you can configure the services (docker containers) used in the project as you usually would locally;
- the computing power and bandwidth are superior to what I have at home. For example, the migration of data from D7 to D9, which I am working on, launched locally takes about 7 minutes, on DrupalPod less than 2 minutes.
Conclusion
For now I can't say that I will only use DrupalPod in my projects, but as a first experience, I find it a very interesting innovative tool to simplify the teammate on-boarding. I will certainly continue to use Drupal not only for the contribution and, apparently, I am not the only one who finds it interesting: JetBrains and Gitpod: Getting Started With Remote Development in IntelliJ IDEA .
I'll write something more as soon as I have news about that. See you soon.