Development workflow with Pantheon.io

How Drupal shops of any size can leverage a better workflow

Saul Willers @ PlexityNet

Drupal Hosting solutions

Pros Cons
Shared hosting / VM Cheap, Relatively flexible Requires some technical know how, Does not scale, Lack of in dev tools
Aegir
previous talk		 Easy to setup, Open Source
(big changes coming in Aegir NG/4.x)		 Drupal only, Requires some technical know how
PaaS
Pantheon.io, Acquia Cloud, Platform.sh		 Dev tools, Established best practice workflows, Extremely scalable, SLA Expensive, One application per site
Docker
previous talk		 Very flexible, Can be highly scalable Requires higher technical know how, Expensive (dev hours) to build and maintain

Pantheon.io

"Hosting without configuring servers"
  • Drupal (and WordPress) specific hosting
  • Speed/scalability (Tuned stack (Nginx & InnoDB), Varnish & Redis preconfigured)
  • Automatic backup & retention
  • Apache Solr (preconfigured)
  • Launch check
  • Workflow:
    • Developer dashboard (useful of all sites)
    • One-click core updates
    • Version control (everything runs via Git)
    • Multidev

Basic Pantheon workflow

Code Moves Up, Content Moves Down

  1. Commit Code in Dev
  2. Combine fresh code from Dev and fresh content from Live in Test
  3. Deploy Code To Live

Basic workflow sample

Multidev Pantheon workflow

Multidev allows a full Pantheon environment to be spun up for any Git branch

... let that sink in for a minute

Multidev UI

Multidev UI

Pantheon for Agencies

  • Multidev only available on Pro plans and above ($100 USD per month)
  • However "Pantheon for Agencies" give all your site Multidev
  • Agency sign up is very straight forward, basically show them 3 sites you've built and you're away.

Pantheon pro tips

Github/Bitbucket for collaborative development

  • Push to Github and use it's code review tools
  • Push to CI (e.g. custom Jenkins setup or TravisCI)
  • Push to Pantheon for deploys
  • Keep Pantheon upstream (very important, allows you to keep one click core updates from Pantheon)
  • Extensive documentation

Pantheon pro tips

Terminus (The Pantheon CLI)

  • Update drush aliases
  • Site operations
  • Workflow operations
  • Team operations

Questions?