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Two events have fortuitously coincided for me recently: I picked up playing Just Cause 3 again (which has almost unbearable load times on the PS4), and I also ended up with a spare 500GB SSD as a result of a PC upgrade. Problem, meet solution?

Now I know from the outset that this is kind of a ridiculous value proposition since the PS4 Slim still has a SATA II interface, and even a used SSD is pretty valuable, but just for kicks and giggles I decided to see if it would make the Just Cause 3 loading screens any less torturous.

The problem

If you are using the core configuration management system in Drupal 8, you might have noticed that out of the box there's no way to re-install Drupal after you've initially installed it and exported configuration according to best practices. The use case is well-described in this Drupal issue, and I've previously posted an in-depth explanation of the errors it typically generates.

On February 3, I presented a session at Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Portland on how to stand up new projects quickly and easily using BLT as the primary developer touchpoint. Below is a summary of the talk, as well as links to a recording and slides. Enjoy!

For debugging purposes, I recently needed to install an older version of Git on my Mac OS machine. I obviously didn't want to permanently replace the version of Git I was already using, I just wanted them to exist side-by-side and temporarily use the older version. Since Homebrew has the built-in ability to maintain multiple versions of a package simultaneously, it seemed like a good solution.

Overview

Depending on your site installation and configuration import workflow, you may occasionally see errors like this when importing configuration:

The import failed due for [sic] the following reasons: Entities exist of type (whatever). These entities need to be deleted before importing.

Needless to say, this isn't the most intuitive error message. Here's what's happening.

Xdebug, PhpStorm, and DrupalVM are all independently awesome tools. Using them together gives you incredible development and debugging powers, but they take a little practice to set up correctly. This tutorial will walk you through that process, and should only take a few minutes.

BLT is a Composer package that acts as a development and testing framework for Drupal sites. I do a lot of work on BLT, so I need a way to hack on it locally while also seeing the real-time effects on a Drupal installation.

All of my Drupal / BLT sites also use DrupalVM for the local development environment, which actually makes this a pretty easy task.

Let's say that my local git checkout of BLT is at /my/package/location. All I have to do is define a new NFS mount for DrupalVM like so (in box/config.yml):

If you are running MySQL in Ubuntu, you may see a message like this whenever you start the MySQL server, followed by a whole bunch of useless information. If you haven't set the root password, then obviously do so. If you have, and still get this message, the culprit is likely AppArmor. Just configure it to allow MySQL access to /root/.my.cnf . (You'll know this is the case if you see an access 'DENIED' message in the syslog whenever you start MySQL)

This is an update to a previous post