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# Drupal 6

Drupal is a free and open source content-management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides a backend framework for at least 2.3% of all web sites worldwide – ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites.

Lando offers a configurable recipe for developing Drupal 6 (opens new window) apps.

# Getting Started

Before you get started with this recipe we assume that you have:

  1. Installed Lando and gotten familiar with its basics
  2. Initialized a Landofile for your codebase for use with this recipe
  3. Read about the various services, tooling, events and routing Lando offers.

However, because you are a developer and developers never ever RTFM (opens new window) you can also run the following commands to try out this recipe with a vanilla install of Drupal 6.

# Initialize a drupal6 recipe using the latest Drupal 6 version
lando init \
  --source remote \
  --remote-url https://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.38.tar.gz \
  --remote-options="--strip-components 1" \
  --recipe drupal6 \
  --webroot . \
  --name my-first-drupal6-app

# Start it up
lando start

# List information about this app.
lando info

# Configuration

While Lando recipes set sane defaults so they work out of the box they are also configurable.

Here are the configuration options, set to the default values, for this recipe's Landofile. If you are unsure about where this goes or what this means, we highly recommend scanning the recipes documentation to get a good handle on how the magicks work.

recipe: drupal6
config:
  php: '5.6'
  composer_version: '2.0.7'
  via: apache:2.4
  webroot: .
  database: mysql:5.7
  drush: ^8
  xdebug: false
  config:
    database: SEE BELOW
    php: SEE BELOW
    server: SEE BELOW
    vhosts: SEE BELOW

Note that if the above config options are not enough, all Lando recipes can be further extended and overriden.

# Choosing a php version

You can set php to any version that is available in our php service. However, you should consult the Drupal requirements (opens new window) to make sure that version is actually supported by Drupal 6 itself.

The recipe config to set the Drupal 6 recipe to use php version 7.1 is shown below:

recipe: drupal6
config:
  php: '7.1'

# Choosing a composer version

You can set composer_version to any version that is available in our php service.

recipe: backdrop
config:
  composer_version: '1.10.1'

# Choosing a web server

By default, this recipe will be served by the default version of our apache service but you can also switch this to use nginx. We highly recommend you check out both the apache and nginx services before you change the default via.

# With Apache (default)

recipe: drupal6
config:
  via: apache

# With nginx

recipe: drupal6
config:
  via: nginx

# Choosing a database backend

By default, this recipe will use the default version of our mysql service as the database backend but you can also switch this to use mariadb or 'postgres' instead. Note that you can also specify a version as long as it is a version available for use with lando for either mysql, mariadb or postgres.

If you are unsure about how to configure the database, we highly recommend you check out the mysql, mariadband 'postgres' services before you change the default.

Also note that like the configuration of the php version, you should consult the Drupal 6 requirements (opens new window) to make sure the database and version you select is actually supported by Drupal 6 itself.

# Using MySQL (default)

recipe: drupal6
config:
  database: mysql

# Using MariaDB

recipe: drupal6
config:
  database: mariadb

# Using Postgres

recipe: drupal6
config:
  database: postgres

# Using a custom version

recipe: drupal6
config:
  database: postgres:9.6

# Using Drush

By default, our Drupal 6 recipe will globally install the latest version of Drush 8 (opens new window) or the latest version of Drush 7 (opens new window) if you are using php 5.3. This means that you should be able to use lando drush out of the box.

That said you can configure this recipe to use any version of Drush to which there is a resolvable package available via composer. That means that the following are all valid.

Use the latest version of Drush

recipe: drupal6
config:
  drush: "*"

Use the latest version of Drush 7

recipe: drupal6
config:
  drush: ^7

Use a specific version of Drush 8

recipe: drupal6
config:
  drush: 8.1.15

# Configuring your root directory

If you are using a webroot besides ., you will need to remember to cd into that directory and run lando drush from there. This is because many site-specific drush commands will only run correctly if you run drush from a directory that also contains a Drupal site.

If you are annoyed by having to cd into that directory every time you run a drush command, you can get around it by overriding the drush tooling command in your Landofile so that Drush always runs from your webroot.

Note that hard coding the root like this may have unforeseen and bad consequences for some drush commands such as drush scr.

tooling:
  drush:
    service: appserver
    cmd: drush --root=/app/PATH/TO/WEBROOT

# Using xdebug

This is just a passthrough option to the xdebug setting that exists on all our php services. The tl;dr is xdebug: true enables and configures the php xdebug extension and xdebug: false disables it.

recipe: drupal6
config:
  xdebug: true|false

However, for more information we recommend you consult the php service documentation.

# Using custom config files

You may need to override our default Drupal 6 config (opens new window) with your own.

If you do this, you must use files that exist inside your application and express them relative to your project root as shown below:

Note that the default files may change based on how you set both ssl and via. Also note that the vhosts and server config will be either for apache or nginx depending on how you set via. We highly recommend you check out both the apache and nginx if you plan to use a custom vhosts or server config.

A hypothetical project

Note that you can put your configuration files anywhere inside your application directory. We use a config directory but you can call it whatever you want such as .lando in the example below:

./
|-- config
   |-- default.conf
   |-- my-custom.cnf
   |-- php.ini
   |-- server.conf
|-- index.php
|-- .lando.yml

Landofile using custom drupal6 config

recipe: drupal6
config:
  config:
    database: config/my-custom.cnf
    php: config/php.ini
    server: config/server.conf
    vhosts: config/default.conf

# Connecting to your database

Lando will automatically set up a database with a user and password and also set an environment variable called LANDO INFO that contains useful information about how your application can access other Lando services.

The default database connection information for a Drupal 7 site is shown below:

Note that the host is not localhost but database.

database: drupal6
username: drupal6
password: drupal6
host: database
# for mysql
port: 3306
# for postgres
# port: 5432

You can get also get the above information, and more, by using the lando info command.

# Importing Your Database

Once you've started up your Drupal 6 site, you will need to pull in your database and files before you can really start to dev all the dev. Pulling your files is as easy as downloading an archive and extracting it to the correct location. Importing a database can be done using our helpful lando db-import command.

# Grab your database dump
curl -fsSL -o database.sql.gz "https://url.to.my.db/database.sql.gz"

# Import the database
# NOTE: db-import can handle uncompressed, gzipped or zipped files
# Due to restrictions in how Docker handles file sharing your database
# dump MUST exist somewhere inside of your app directory.
lando db-import database.sql.gz

You can learn more about the db-import command over here.

# Tooling

By default, each Lando Drupal 6 recipe will also ship with helpful dev utilities.

This means you can use things like drush, composer and php via Lando and avoid mucking up your actual computer trying to manage php versions and tooling.

lando composer          Runs composer commands
lando db-export [file]  Exports database from a service into a file
lando db-import <file>  Imports a dump file into database service
lando drush             Runs drush commands
lando mysql             Drops into a MySQL shell on a database service
lando php               Runs php commands

Usage examples

# Download a dependency with drush
lando drush dl views

# Run composer tests
lando composer test

# Drop into a mysql shell
lando mysql

# Check the app's installed php extensions
lando php -m

You can also run lando from inside your app directory for a complete list of commands. This is always advisable as your list of commands may not be 100% the same as above. For example, if you set database: postgres you will get lando psql instead of lando mysql.

← Drupal 7 →