Composer

Tip of the day: patching legacy Drupal 7 projects with Composer

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Some late Drupal 7 projects use Composer for project structure and tooling, even though they don't use Composer for the Drupal requirements proper. In that case, the normal Drupal 8/9 patching process using cweagans/composer-patches is not available, since dependencies are not handled with Composer. So is there a way to apply patches cleanly from Composer ? Sure there is! Let's see how.

Drupal tip of the day: PHPUnit 6 tests with composer-project/drupal-project

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The problem

When trying to run PHPUnit tests on the MongoDB contrib module for the soon-ready 8.2.0 version, I recently starting encountering this error:

PHPUnit testing framework version 6 or greater is required when running on PHP 7.0 or greater.
Run the command 'composer run-script drupal-phpunit-upgrade' in order to fix this.

OK, no big deal, let's just run that command.

# From $PROJECT/web/core directory
$ ../../vendor/bin/composer run-script drupal-phpunit-upgrade

In RunScriptCommand.php line 89:

Script "drupal-phpunit-upgrade" is not defined in this package
run-script [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--dev] [--no-dev] [-l|--list] [--] [] []...
$

Hmm, so I need that command but it is not defined in composer.json. So where is it ?

Tip of the day: how to debug Composer scripts with XDebug and PhpStorm

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The problem: XDebug doesn't work for Composer scripts

PhpStorm is quite convenient to debug scripts with XDebug (do you support Derick for giving us XDebug ?): just add a "Run/Debug configuration", choosing the "PHP Script" type, give a few parameters, and you can start debugging your PHP CLI scripts, using breakpoints, evaluations, etc.

Wonderful. So now, let's define such a configuration to debug a Composer script, say a Behat configuration generator from site settings for some current Drupal 8 project. Apply the configuration, run it in debug mode, and ....

...PhpStorm doesn't stop, the script runs and ends, and all breakpoints were ignored. How to actually use breakpoints in the IDE ?

How to install a Drupal Composer based project when packages.drupal.org is down

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The problem: packages.drupal.org broken

I was starting my weekly work for the Drupal GraphQL module by the customary composer update --prefer-source -vvv command, ready to watch composer spit out some hundred lines sipping my coffee, but this time something turned out to be wrong:

  [...snip...]
Downloading https://packages.drupal.org/8/drupal/provider-2016-4%24a30289dd8394e5271bd77777bb14b361c5938656f1cddad7fae1c00d5d6ba9c6.json

  [Composer\Downloader\TransportException]
  The "https://packages.drupal.org/8/drupal/provider-2016-4%24a30289dd8394e5271bd77777bb14b361c5938656f1cddad7fae1c00d5d6ba9c6.json" file could not be downloaded (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)
  [...snip...]

OK, so packages.drupal.org is down for now. How can we work around this ?

Tip of the day: Phing, Composer and namespaced Task classes

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Among the interesting features of Phing is its extensibility, and of the hallmarks of that exensibility is the ability to define new Task types as PHP classes, which are by default located in the default namespace only. Can we do better ?

Step 0: "Ad-hoc" (inline) tasks

At the simplest, Task classes are created by embedding ad-hoc tasks like: