For years we heard the most common excuse a developer can have when facing a bug that reached production: It worked on my computer!
As developers, we got used to developing on our laptop, using a local IDE, pushing and integrating in test environments, and finally deploying to production. This has been the most normal lifecycle for every line of code we wrote.
We do this, acknowledging the challenges of managing and stabilizing local developments, which degrades our development experience and reduces the time we are actively developing.
Over time, software web development became more complex with more dependencies. Containerized solutions for local development, such as DDEV and Lando, became the standard way to set up local Drupal development. But the truth is that today it is harder to have a simple and stable local Drupal development environment than it was 10 years ago.
There are growing pains in local development, including performance bottlenecks, security concerns, and the ever-present struggle with changes in operating systems and dependencies.
This complicates Drupal development for beginners, adds complexity when switching projects and contexts, and raises the barrier for quick code contributions for Drupal.
Remote development was always possible, but never felt the same as local. This has changed in recent years with progress in remote support for most common IDEs (VSCode and PhpStorm) and the appearance of complete Cloud Development Platforms such as Gitpod.io. They make it possible to use your laptop solely as a client/terminal to your powerful remote development environment. In reality, you don’t even need a laptop; any device running a browser is enough.
The Drupal community rapidly understood this paradigm, and we see a growing number of companies and developers opting for this option when teaching, contributing, and maintaining Drupal projects.
In this session, we will explore this problem and present several solutions for remote development:
- What is needed to set up a remote development environment for Drupal
- How to prepare a Drupal website for remote development
- What are the options for remote development and ephemeral environments creation
- How to have a complete toolset including Xdebug, Drush, PHPUnit, and others fully working as they do in a local setup
- Explore Gitpod.io and its potential when developing customer projects and Drupal contributions
Additional Information
- Link to Drupal.org: Drupal.org
- Speakers:
- Hernâni Borges de Freitas (hernani)
- Room: Sala Hiberus
- Talk Level: Intermediate
- Language: Spanish/English