CLI tools is a great way to automate certain tasks for your CI needs. For example you re-use same shell scripts project to project. Or maybe you are integrating with some third-party service. Abstracting these tasks into your own CLI tool could be a great way to go.

You can think about some examples from Drupal world -- each hosting provider has some sort of CLI tool. European Commission has one to automate certain DevOps tasks (https://github.com/openeuropa/task-runner).

When we are talking about tools for local development -- there is a huge variety of options. It is less and less common to set up LAMP stack locally. Instead more developers use docker based environments. In Drupal world there are quite a few of them: docker4drupal, Lando, Docksal, DDEV.

In my last few years I used to work with Docksal and recently also started using DDEV. In this article I would like to demonstrate the differences between the two.

Drupal updates can be very different. Some of them -- easy patches that you just roll out and forget. Some of them -- break your site. Tricky part is you never know how updates will behave on your site until you actually tried them out.

This is why it is very tricky to give estimates to clients how long it is going to take. They usually do not appreciate answer 1 to 20 hours depending on some random facts.

When you set up your Continuous Integration you really would like to set your deployments automatically. If you use Acquia hosting for your website it does make a lot of sense to use all environments in your workflow. But how you can automate deployments to these environments without touching UI (copying database, files, deploying code)?

The answer is in Cloud API

You can call them either with drush command or curl request. We will touch the drush commands approach in this post.

Visual testing is a great technique to keep styles of your website under control. But what other things visual testing can catch? Maybe some problems with functionality?

It is always best to see visual testing on real life projects. In this article we have done testing of Drupal.org website by comparing it with its staging environment and found some interesting issues.

Read full article on BackTrac's blog

Please leave your comments on BackTrac's blog instead of here. Thanks!

Testing stale designs

Usually visual testing is very effective when website has stable design that should not be broken.

There are projects the whole idea of those is to keep design the same but to migrate the content to new platform. This is where visual regression testing can help a lot to identify very fast what pages are not yet complete and which ones are 100% accurate and can be shown to client.

The Idea of visual testing of your website has been around for a while. This can range from someone manually checking a web page or more for visual defects or automating the process of detecting visual changes. The cause for unwanted visual changes usually comes from CSS stylesheet changes.

For developers, it is important to understand how to incorporate the visual testing into your existing workflow. As usual there are multiple options out there and we will be listing them below. from the easiest to the most complex.

Logstash is a great tool to centralize logs in your environment. For example we have several drupal webheads that write logs into syslog. It would be really nice to see those logs somewhere centrally to find out about your system's health status and debug potential problems.

In this article I would like to show how easy to start using logstash for local development.

In this article we will show small code snippet that helps you to control very granular how to render submit buttons on your forms.

Behat is great testing tool that there are already has a lot of documentation.

In drupal we have extension that helps us to build tests. Behat tests are configurable in yaml file (like url of your website and other options). Lately I needed to set custom cUrl options (goutte driver) and because Drupal extension 3 uses Guzzle 4 library it was not that obvious how to do that.