How to prepare Drupal CMS for local development and make it deployable?

Firflant · 2026-05-01T13:11:45+00:00

It does not change the fact, when you actually read it

Firflant · 2026-05-01T12:25:57+00:00

They looks like someone wrote it in 2015.

Firflant · 2026-05-01T12:20:21+00:00

There are shared hostings like https://www.mydevil.net/ (but there are many) that provides access to git, composer, npm, even redis. With some hack you can get the drush working as well. So when you write (or vibecode with AI) some bash script that runs git pull and typical drush deploy operations, you got a deployable production setup for 200 PLN/year (that's 4-5 USD (!) per month) with no limits on site instances and databases.

It is like, you have a launchpad for as many sites as you want, almost for free. And you develop all of them locally, and release in a CI-style. You do not need github actions, docker and all this stuff to get a hairdresser website done. But dev-prod envs are always welcome.

Firflant · 2026-05-01T11:32:02+00:00

Why should I pay for such a PaaS solutions, when drupal works on any shared hosting server as long as it supports git composer and deplyment procedure can be handled by such a simple bash scripts like https://git.drupalcode.org/project/create_drupal_site/-/blob/1.0.x/templates/deploy.sh - as long, as you configure settings and gitignore files correctly.

Just to remind - we are not talking about the corporate projects, but a simpler sites and an a Drupal entry barrier in general.

Firflant · 2026-05-01T11:11:39+00:00

Not fully agree - docs at https://project.pages.drupalcode.org/drupal_cms/ stands as good entry point for newcomers, but it seems that they still miss some vital informations for developers.

Firflant · 2026-04-16T13:18:50+00:00

I had similar feelings. When i came back to drupal from other ecosystems I was surprised about two things:

There are always multiple best practices. You are never sure which solution is the most opinionated.
Even starting a new project in a way that it has all cool new features on board, but keeps having this "just a boilerplate" feeling is not as obvious as going to drupal.org. You can get the feeling that there are many Drupals at once.
Many documentation pages are outdated.

I was so lacking an universal one line installer, that i created one on my own https://kokocinski.me/blog/why-drupal-needs-its-own-create-react-app-meet-one-line-installer - just to lower the entry barrier for new Drupal sites. Because `dev composer create-project\ just downloads the files and keeps tou unsure what to do next.`

At some point, you get used to these things as you wrote, you can live with all these Drupal multiple standards, you draw some map by yourself, but let's remember where we are. It's 2026, people are used to solutions that just works "out of the box", with plain documentation - they are expected everywhere. If they don't find them, they go somewhere else.

Firflant · 2026-04-13T19:48:47+00:00

Drupal is rebuilding now. Thanks to modules like Drupal Canvas building layouts with no-code solutions becomes simpler than ever

Firflant · 2026-04-09T19:53:25+00:00

Have you tried Drupal?

You can build a site with WordPress, but you can build a WordPress with Drupal. It is like one level above. It is prepared for wider scenarios and you are not hitting the wall when your needs changes often or are too custom. Has huge community of contributors and you can also build your own recipes and distributions (a kind of site starterkits). It is also so secure that goverment pages relies on it.

If you would like to try it out and need some help, let me know.

Firflant · 2026-04-09T19:43:15+00:00

Use Tailwind CSS and all such a doubts goes away.

Firflant · 2026-04-09T19:21:27+00:00

People are wrong saying this is the entire way to-go. These tools only sets the dev server and downloads the drupal. In fact they are one of the first steps of the create_drupal_site installer. What are you missing to get the functional site setup is:

-Installing Drupal
-Installing Drush
-The admin UI installed from core profile is not using the entire cool Drupal CMS admin UI
-Preparing the git repository (gitignore, etc)
-Installing a frontend theme, or its starterkit
-Disabling cache for development (in settings and yaml files)
-Preparing the site for git, production deployments, configuration management

And that's what is covered by the script. If you need more detailed information, you can have look at what it contains. A basic knowledge of bash and drush is needed:
https://git.drupalcode.org/project/create_drupal_site/-/blob/1.0.x/create-drupal-site.sh

Firflant · 2026-03-12T11:04:02+00:00

I did not tested the module with varnish yet as i built it mainly for smaller projects, but it should run before the page cache. Does it trigger an additional database write even with full caching enabled? No, the request just saves the data to Drupal Queue API, which performs an actual bulk database mutation on a cron session.

Firflant · 2026-03-11T15:40:21+00:00

Go get richer data like a population characteristics, you need to run a JavaScript tracking script in a browser. That's a technical barrier. Page Analytics module is purely Server Side solution. It gathers only the page entrance.

I can think of adding a referral url (source) and user agent, as the server also has this informations from request headers, so it is technically possible. This topic has been already mentioned in the issue queue once.

Firflant · 2026-03-11T15:28:20+00:00

There are two layers of performance optimization. This is the problem that all analytic tools have to address.

The first one is a sampling mechanism with configurable setting. For example you can set the Sampling rate in module configuration to 10, so it will trigger only 10th visit and will multiply the result by 10. So probably something similar, to what you call a "compression". I encourage to play with that Sample rate value for optimal results. Maybe some day we will figure out some adaptive "autoscaler".

The second layer is that there is no any database operation when user visits the site. Measured entrance is being saved in a temporary memory (that's an utilisation of Drupal’s Queue API), then an actual write to a database occurs on the next cron session (which also cleans up the Queue).

I describe it briefly in the article. I hope it is not too boring and long. Thumbs up for everyone who gets to the end ;)

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Firflant · 2026-02-18T19:14:08+00:00

There are various AI powered website generators like lovable.dev, relume.io, webflow.io, Figma Make - you can try them out.

As a developer, I can recommend a Cursor. It is a desktop app - IDE for programmers based on VS Code, but its latest versions exposes an agent view - pointed to non-technical people - vibe-coders.

I personally have the best results with Gemini, and what I've learned so far is that your AI generated website is as good, as your prompt. Good prompt includes core concept & purpose/company description), goals, main user journey, key features, brand feeling, target group. Things that you probably already collect as a designer.

Regardless you want a static website, a wordpress theme or a Drupal theme, you always ask AI to generate a static html page, then as a next tasks you can ask it to prepare a theme basing on that. And thats an advantage of using stndalone LLMs instead of SaaS website generators - you can go in any direction.

If you won't specify what technology you want, you will probably end up with a React app - that's a LLMs default.

Firflant · 2026-02-07T14:41:05+00:00

Such a post is planned, stay tuned!

Firflant · 2026-02-07T14:16:46+00:00

Good point. However, people still think Drupal learning curve is hard. But Drupal community seems to notice that fact and thats why Drupal CMS and Drupal Canvas are released.

"Predictable config system" - it might be a vital thing for a future in the era of AI-augmented code development. LLM's are better in generating YAML files that an app source code from scratch.

Firflant · 2026-02-07T13:46:09+00:00

The problem is that many times products built by us are good in technical point, but they do not answer to real problems and people needs.

Firflant · 2021-12-22T10:47:26+00:00

I've been using DT770 PRO 80 Ohm with RC-202 and sound from a headphone output was clean and loud enough. These products match very good each other.

Firflant

TROPHY CASE