Category: Lando

Faster Drupal Development on Linux

~ stephencross ~ Leave a comment

Local Drupal development has moved to docker based environments with solutions like Lando and DDEv. With these tools, it’s fast and easy to spin up a local environment and manage many projects. The days of MAMP and WAMP are (long) gone.

Here’s the problem, Mac OS is the dominant development platform for Drupal developers, and Docker runs terribly on it. Docker interacts differently with macOS than it does with Linux. The source code on the host computer is shared with Docker containers. The multiple layers of communication between Docker and the macOS file system make file-sharing very slow. While Docker’s direct access to the Linux file system makes it very fast. This video, Improving Docker Desktop File Sharing Performance, from DockerCon 18 describes this issue in detail.

The file-sharing performance issue became apparent when working with a colleague to set up a new Drupal 8 website build. I was shocked to see the local build process taking over 8 minutes on my colleague’s computer and less than 30 seconds on my computer.

Benchmarks

In an unscientific way, with some help from my friends, I tested the build process on a few Macs and Linux computers with different hardware specs. Each computer had Docker and Lando installed. The website is a Drupal 8 Standard profile with Acquia’s BLT. The test is simple, run the BLT artifact build, blt artifact:build

Below are the results of this test.

ComputerSpecsOSArtifact:build
ThinkPad T420 (2011)i5 (2 cores), 8GB RAM, SSDLinux (Endevour OS)20 seconds
Custom Build (2020)Ryzen i7 (8 cores), 32GB, SSDLinux (Endevour OS)7 seconds
Macbook Air (2018)i5 (2 cores), 8GB RAM, SSDmacOS Catalina8+ minutes
MacBook Pro (2015)i7 (4 cores), 16GB RAM, SSDmacOS Mojave6 minutes

Solutions

There are some potential solutions. Lando has an undocumented Mac-only feature called “Turbo Mode”. Reviewing the issue thread, there are mixed results with this implementation. Turbo Mode had little impact on my test case shaving off 30 to 60 seconds. A 5% to 10% improvement is good, but when comparing it to performance on Linux, there is no practical improvement. Others have seen better improvements with Turbo Mode. This approach is easy to implement and worth exploring, but Turbo Mode hasn’t made it’s way into Lando as a supported feature. Use with caution.

Some tweaks can be made to your Docker configuration. Increasing the default RAM usage from 2GB to 4GB is a starting point. You can also limit the number of shared folders Docker watches, by default, the entire /Users folder is included. I tested the memory upgrade and limited the shared folders to only the necessary application folders. Similar to the results with Turbo Mode, they were minimal for my test case. You may have more promising results. There are many online resources with recommendations to improve performance, search “Docker Mac performance”.

The beauty of using Lando is simplicity, which starts to diminish with lots of OS based tweaks. I suspect more research and testing could result in better performance on Mac. BUT, using Linux for Drupal development with Docker will get you the best performance by far, with ease. It’s that simple.

Drupal 8 and Lando

~ stephencross ~ Leave a comment

Overview

Below are steps to setup a local Drupal 8 composer based environment using Lando.

Prerequisites

You need to have Lando installed using these instructions.

Steps

Create a local folder. <app> will be the name of your application folder and Lando instance.

mkdir <app>

Position your working directory as your new folder

cd <app>

Initialize Lando and answer a few questions. This utility creates a .lando.yml file in your working directory. When you start Lando in the next step, this file is used to define the Lando configuration. 

lando init
Choose: current working directory
Choose: Drupal8
Enter for webroot: web
Enter for app: <app>

Start Lando

lando start

Install Drupal code using composer. Note – Drupal is being install in a Docker container, not on your local computer. 

lando composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev blah -n

The above command uses composer to install Drupal and it’s dependencies into a folder called ‘blah’. Now, the files/folders in ‘blah’ will be move up one level into your directory and the ‘blah’ folder will be removed.

mv blah/* .
mv blah/.* .
rm -rf blah

Rebuild Lando containers.

lando rebuild -y

On a success rebuilt on Lando, it’s time to install Drupal 8. Goto the local URL for your Drupal 8 website.

https://<app>.lndo.site

Follow the steps in the Drupal installation Wizard. When the database page appears, use ‘drupal8’ for the database name, username and password. Also, use ‘database’ for the host name (under the Advanced settings.

You should be up and running,

Updates

12/10/2019 – As of Drupal 8.8.0, Composer project templates are now available as part of Drupal core. The composer create-project command was updated to reflect this change.

Backstop JS and Lando

~ stephencross ~ Leave a comment

I’ve recently started using Backstop JS for visual regression testing. You can add the following settings to your Lando configuration, .lando.yml, to include Backstop JS.

services:
   node:
     type: node:10
     globals:
       backstopjs: "latest"
     command: npm start
     run_as_root:
       - apt-get -y update && apt-get -y install software-properties-common
       - wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub && apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub
       - add-apt-repository "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main"
       - apt-get -y update && apt-get -y install google-chrome-stable
 tooling:
   backstop:
     service: node

You will need to use the .internal URL from Lando to access the local website. For example:

  "scenarios": [
    {
      "label": "Homepage",
      "url": "http://appserver_nginx.your-site-name.internal"
    }

The backstop commands will be run through Lando tooling:

lando backstop reference
lando backstop test