In each of my posts on setting up a local development environment on OS X, it's mentioned that you need to add your website's domain, even though it's local, in your /etc/hosts file. My preferred way to edit the hosts file on OS X is using Gas Mask. If you wanted to create the local virtual host projectx.dev, you would add the line 127.0.0.1 projectx.dev in /etc/hosts or with Gas Mask, and then use that same value in either ServerName in Apache or server_name in Nginx. This can be tedious for adding new sites. Luckily there's a way to set this up once and then never have to edit your hosts file again for adding new local virtual hosts.

Nginx is quickly becoming a popular, low resource alternative to Apache for many websites. This doesn't come without challenges, such as using PHP as CGI due to not having mod_php available. Nginx also does not use any Apache configuration rules, nor does it use .htaccess or anything like it, so it requires additional configuration regardless of the web application being deployed. A big help in getting Nginx started with Drupal is António P. P. Almeida's drupal-with-nginx configuration, which makes it fairly simple to deploy in Linux. But what about local development on OS X? Read on to learn get all of the required components set up for your system, as well as the modifications necessary to get drupal-with-nginx set up on OS X.

As one blogger has put it: “we cannot avoid testing javascript anymore”…especially when it comes to testing sophisticated client-side web apps that integrate with our servers via various APIs. As we begin to build more complex interactive functionality and web applications, making sure that our JS code is working correctly becomes central to our QA process. Tools like Drupal’s SimpleTest implementation are great for unit testing our server-side code and basic input-output expectations, but effective testing of advanced client-side functionality requires a robust, fast, JavaScript based solution.

Following up on our recent post introducing the Backbone module for Drupal, this post will cover how to test Drupal JS apps using the QUnit module. We’ve chosen QUnit in large part because its GPL lisence makes it a good fit for Drupal development, and the QUnit module is a mature, well designed implementation.

Backbone-Rails is a useful gem for setting up Backbone.js in your Rails 3.1 app by providing all the necessary javascript files & dependencies (easy future upgrades with bundler), as well as some generators to setup your MVC directory structure. It uses EJS (Embedded JavaScript, part of Underscore.js I believe) as it's default javascript templating language and installs the ruby-ejs gem as a dependency.

If you've submitted a project for consideration in a Drupal.org project application or issue queue, you may have received a review that looks something like this, a seemigly-endless stream of errors relating to whitespace in comments, function argument documentation format, and horribly malformed "else" statements. We can thank Drupal Code Sniffer and it's web-service offspring, the Automated project review tool at ventral.org, for much of this turn toward strict compliance reviewing. While we all know that it's "the right way to go", it can often be quite discouraging to hvae to churn through a list of what feels like miniscule issues in order to share code with the community, especially when many of those issues are caused by inconsistencies between standard code editor templates, documentation auto-generators, and what Drupal.org requires.

The good news, though, is that we can get one step ahead of the review process, and integrate these new tools into our development environment to ensure that the code we write for Drupal is alway 100% compiant, from the start.

OS X Lion comes with most of the tools you would need to do "MAMP" (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) development, as outlined in my previous posts once you add a database. So then why would you want to use MacPorts? Setting your development environment up in MacPorts isolates the binaries, libraries, and configuration files, completely separate from the existing OS X install (with the exception of startup scripts). You can also tweak the configuration files on your own, apply your own patches, and apply updates that MacPorts may get before Apple pushes them. It will take more time because you'll be compiling everything, but you have all of the control. Read on for how to get things set up.

OS X Lion ships with Apache and PHP, which both require a little bit of tweaking to get fully-functional for "MAMP" local development. The one thing Lion does not ship with is a database. This will be very similar to my previous post on local development but this time we'll be using Homebrew to install either MySQL or MariaDB for the database. Since we'll be using a compiler for Homebrew, I'll also cover how to add APC and other PECL modules that you can add to OS X.

It seems to be standard for Drupal, at least in version 6, that Watchdog is enabled and used to write errors/warnings/notices to the watchdog table in the database. Depending on the verbosity of your PHP output, amount of 404s, or other information that would be going into this log, it could mean a lot of writes on your database. While you should trace errors/warnings and solve them, sometimes you may want this increased information for debugging. If your site receives a lot of traffic, this could mean decreased database performance. A solution to this is to instead utilize the core Syslog module instead of Watchdog. Here's how I got it set up in Drupal 6 on CentOS 5 servers.

So recently I wanted to filter by URL title, having used it extensively as a text field with an optional link in a site.

The code below is supposed to apply to an exposed Link module field filter in Views. Instead of searching to see if the search string matches the URL, this will match the URL title that was provided.

In the code below, you would replace node_data_{field_publication_author.field_publication_author} with the name of your field, in all places that "field_publication_author" occurs in the below.