When you make a few Drupal sites, you will eventually find that you want to be able to take a feature that you created on one site and move it across to another site. After all, why re-invent the wheel!

My procedure for doing this has changed over time, using the features module was the way with Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, but with Drupal 8, we have better configuration management, and modules to help make things easier.

Features is again one of the modules that can be used, but I prefer a lighter approach, though its perhaps a little more work.

Covid means some extra time away from my day job at the University of Adelaide. This means I have a fortnight of time to work on side projects as if they were my full time gig. This is a great opportunity to knock some things out, so this is the plan.

Recently I started having an issue with composer update or composer install on macOS. I ignored it for a bit and used Linux instead, but had to fix it eventually. When running composer update -n, the error was:

Mostly documenting for myself, but these are the steps it took to get quickly up to speed in macOS with php, composer, docker for development.

Disable blocking apps from the internet:

sudo spctl --master-disable

Now, install the applications that we want from known sources.

I had an issue on the weekend where the backup command, running in a docker container:

restic backup /shared

Would always report that all files were new, but when run repeatedly in the same container would work a treat.

With Docker Desktop for Mac, its finally possible to forward the ssh agents from the host through to a container. Wooohooo.

But. If you are accessing the Mac itself via ssh, then any ssh identities that are forwarded cannot be forwarded into the container.

Eg, I was on Linux, ssh'ing to the mac and trying to bring up the docker containers with the identity. It doesn't work, couldn't get the identities to come through.

Have just upgraded to 20.04 and this time have disabled snaps completely.

https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-10-and-20-04-lts/

Thanks Kevin and commenters.

I had an issue with running site-install on a Drupal 9 site where the exported views in the config/optional directory were not being imported.

After some diagnosis, the reason is that there was a change and now the optional config is imported before the install profile is activated - See change record - https://www.drupal.org/node/3118908

My problem was there were user roles in the config/install of the profile that the exported views depended on.

With the release of Drupal 9 just days away, I wanted to take it for a spin, and updated the Shepherd scaffold we use for OpenShift deployments so that things work nicely. If you already have docker, docker-compose & composer installed, try these steps to give it a spin.

With Ubuntu 19.10, they moved Chromium from a .deb to a snap install only.

This makes browser startup times much slower and causes weird effects when saving files, and basically made me stop using Chromium as a consequence :-(

Today I found this article which gave the info on how to switch back to a .deb installed chromium and get back to normal.