Hedron: Or my dissatisfaction with local development.

I like things that work. I think most technicians do, but as a web developer I have a very serious problem. My most effective environment for doing web development is the one that exists on my own personal box. It can also be a rather impractical place to develop because most of my customers (current and historic) are on rather customized server stacks. Typically, the host has customized the environment to their own specifications. It's not uncommon to find additional services like solr or maybe a memcache server in the mix. I work for a company who builds its own platform but I personally have no control over what environment gets built for a customer, nor do I have any influence over where the tech stack is going at a higher level.

I'm not an Ops guy. I don't like screwing with server configuration. It makes me cranky. But I'm also not blind and I do like artifact generation. I have a long history with what we in the Drupal community think of as "artifacts". We us a tool called drush make and build and distribute Drupal profiles (i.e. artifacts) through it. In recent years, PHP itself has adopted this same style of approach with composer.json/lock files as have many other programming communities. If you look at what Docker does with their docker files and things like docker-compose, these are tools that build consistent "ops artifacts"... regardless of where they're built (ish). Following these threads of commonality, I decided I wanted to build a better local development environment tool. Hopefully one that would be inclusive in nature and give communities outside the ones I've historically associated myself with an opportunity to benefit and contribute.

Hedron:

Hedron is an PHP and Docker-based tool for generating ops and development artifacts that work in tandem to give you a local development environment with the flexibility to match what exists in your hosting environment. For ops, Hedron depends on docker-compose to build out clusters of containers providing the same basic environment as your production system. For development, Hedron embeds a Drupal 8-inspired plugin system to give developers the flexibility to build their development artifacts in whatever way makes the most sense for them. I've personally spent some time on a Drupal 8 workflow because I know Drupal 8, and it works well enough for people to experiment with and begin improving.

Hedron leverages many of the tools Drupal and PHP developers are already used to. Out of the box you'll find:

• Familiar Symfony components
• A Drupal 8-inspired plugin system rewritten from scratch
• A powerful set of tools for responding to git push commands
• On demand development environments per git branch
• Helpful CLI tool
• Room to contribute ;-)

Hedron is broken up into two separate components today with Hedron and HedronCLI. HedronCLI is designed to ease using and installing Hedron with built in commands for installing the core of Hedron, adding clients and projects, and managing docker clusters per project with ease. In addition to this my father has helped me put together an initial docker-compose build that should work well for Drupal 8, and we've made that available along side Hedron on github. Our main website should have all the instructions you need to get started.

What you'll need:

Hedron has a few dependencies:

• php 7.x
• composer
• docker (and docker-compose if they're not packaged together for you)
• git

You'll need these 4 things installed on your local machine. Ultimately I'd like to see Hedron evolve to a point where it ONLY needs docker, but I'm not certain how best to do that today, and I'm more interested in forward movement. (Fail fast, fail early)

Caveats:

Docker-for-mac is SLOOOOOW. I mean like, really slow. This is due to an issue with OSXFS shares. There are work-arounds, I've not yet delved into what's involved, so just keep in mind if you're on a mac, YMMV a lot depending on the newness of your machine and as always "patches welcome".

I hope people give Hedron a try. I've put a bit of thought into how I personally want to develop going forward, and I feel like this is moving in the right direction. I think there's a ton of potential for future improvement and expansions into other offerings based on Hedron. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.