OK, so you know the contents has almost nothing to do with the pseudo-clickbait-y title, right ? Well, actually it has: this is about the single most useful command in Drupal development. Guess which ?

While exporting a project from Unfuddle in order to import its issues to Jira, I took a look at the other files beyond backup.xml and the media/ directory. Turns out that when Unfuddle provides you with a project backup, it includes the repositories in an undocumented (on their site, at least) format, under the dmp file extension. Let's find out how to actually use these.

The mystery

There are a number of issues on StackOverflow and elsewhere about the problems met when upgrading to PHP 7, so when I upgraded a Debian Wheezy server this week, I only upgraded to Jessie with its standard 5.6 version, not expecting problems. But of course, there had to be this mystifying error which seems to be most often associated with PHP 7.0 : like Debian bug 709302:

[Wed May 22 14:20:26 2013] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required './libraries/php-gettext/gettext.inc' (include_path='.') in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/select_lang.lib.php on line 389
[Wed May 22 14:20:26 2013] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: /require_once(): Failed opening required /'./libraries/php-gettext/gettext.inc' (include_path='.') in //usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/select_lang.lib.php on line 389
[Wed May 22 14:20:26 2013] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required './libraries/php-gettext/gettext.inc' (include_path='.') in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/select_lang.lib.php on line 389

So how do we fix this for 5.6 ?

When you use Drush, especially in crontabs, you may sometimes be bitten by RAM or duration limits. Of course, running Drush with the "-d" option will provide this information, but it will only do so at the end of an annoyingly noisy output debugging the whole command run.

On the other hand, just running the Drush command within a time command won't provide fine memory reporting. Luckily Drush implements hooks to make acquiring this information easily, so here is a small gist you can use as a standalone Drush plugin or add to a module of your own:

On behalf of all contributors to the MongoDB module suite for Drupal over the years, I am pleased to announce the 8.x-2.0-alpha1 release of the MongoDB package for Drupal 8, six years after we started this project on Drupal 6.

This release is the first step to an initial stable release of the MongoDB package for Drupal 8, containing:

• mongodb a module exposing the new PHP library as Symfony services exposed to a Drupal 8.x instance. It is designed as a minimal and consistent connection layer on top of the PHP library for MongoDB, for all modules targeting MongoDB on Drupal 8.x, be they contributed or bespoke.
• mongodb_watchdog a PSR-3 logger storing event data in MongoDB. On top of the features already present in 6.x and 7.x versions, it introduces a per-request report showing all events logged during a request, in order.

These are the slides of the presentation I gave last week at DrupalDevDays Milan about the ways using Queue API can help you speed up Drupal sites, especially in connected mode.

2017-10-21 UPDATE: attend this session in French at DrupalCamp Lannion next week !

These are the slides of the presentation I gave yesterday at DrupalDevDays Milan.

Graylog is, in the words of its creators, a tool to Store, search & analyze log data from any source, and it puts a lot of power in our hands to slice, dice, and generally combine, gather, and parse content from various sources, notably syslog and Gelf sources, as well as many file-type sources thanks to the Graylog Collector. Which means it makes it a snap to build event-oriented dashboards like the left part of this example, and even some event volume graphs like the topmost one on the right.

The problem: logging non-event information

This covers only logged events, which is fine overall, since Graylog is a log analysis platform, not a graph-oriented monitoring system like Munin / Cati / Ganglia et alii. However, in many cases, especially when building dashboards instead of performing some specific research, one may want to keep an eye on average system load, or other non-event information, if only to know when to switch one's attention to the monitoring system.

So how can one add system load information, which is not event-based, to a log dashboard like the three bottom-right graphs on the previous dashboard ?