Setting up Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) for a Drupal, WordPress, or any other type of web application involves several steps and tools, aiming to automate the testing, building, and deployment processes. Drupal, being a popular content management system, benefits greatly from CI/CD practices for efficient development and deployment. Here are some common ways to set up CI/CD for a Drupal application
1.) Version Control System Setup
- Initialize a Git Repository: Use Git for version control to manage your Drupal codebase. Store your custom modules, themes, and configuration in the repository.
- Branching Strategy: Adopt a branching strategy like Git Flow or Trunk Based Development to manage features, fixes, and releases systematically.
2.) CI/CD Platform Integration
- Choose a CI/CD Platform: Platforms like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Travis CI, and GitHub Actions can be used to automate the CI/CD pipeline.
- Configuration: Use the platform's configuration file (e.g., `.gitlab-ci.yml` for GitLab CI/CD or `.github/workflows/main.yml` for GitHub Actions) to define the pipeline steps, including linting, testing, building, and deploying.
3.) Automated Testing
- Unit Testing: Implement unit tests for custom modules and themes using PHP Unit. Run these tests in your CI pipeline.
- Behavioral Testing: Use tools like Behat for behavioral-driven development (BDD) to test the application from the user's perspective.
- Visual Regression Testing: Tools like BackstopJS can be used to detect visual regressions after updates.
4.) Building and Deployment
- Configuration Management: Use Drupal's Configuration Management system to export and import site configuration between environments. This can be automated in your CI/CD pipeline.
- Automated Deployment: Configure the CI/CD pipeline to deploy changes to environments automatically. This can be deployed to a development environment, staging, and then production, for example.
- Environment Consistency: Utilize Docker or another containerization tool to ensure consistency across environments. Tools like Lando and DDEV can be particularly helpful for Drupal development for setting up your local environment.
5.) Continuous Deployment Strategies
- Rolling Updates: Gradually replace instances of the previous version of your app with the new version without downtime.
- Blue-Green Deployment: Maintain two production environments (Blue and Green). Switch from Blue (old version) to Green (new version) once ready.
- Canary Releases: Gradually roll out the change to a small subset of users before making it available to everyone.
6.) Monitoring and Feedback
- Logging and Monitoring: Implement logging and monitoring solutions (e.g., New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana) to keep an eye on application performance and errors.
- Feedback Loops: Ensure feedback from the monitoring tools is integrated back into the development process for continuous improvement.
To sum up, let's review the hi-level basic implementation steps we need to complete to get our setup successfully in place. In general your setup will contain these steps. Your own configuration might be slightly different, of course depending on your project and team needs and wants.
- Repository Setup: Organize your Drupal codebase in a Git repository.
- Pipeline Configuration: Define your CI/CD pipeline in the chosen platform, specifying stages for testing, building, and deployment.
- Automate Testing: Implement automated tests and integrate them into your CI pipeline.
- Deployment Automation: Script the deployment process, including database updates, configuration imports, and cache clearing, to run automatically as part of the CD pipeline.
- Monitor and Improve: Use feedback from production to iterate and improve both the application and the CI/CD process.
Each Drupal project might have specific needs, so tailor your CI/CD setup to best fit your application's architecture, hosting environment, and development practices.
This article is part of a series on DevOps and Drupal. Parts of this article are also published by me on the Acquia Developer Portal.
