Local development has long been considered a best practice, but new Drupal users have few options to help them install a local server and run Drupal on it easily. Even advanced developers often use out-dated local development environments like MAMP that don't allow customization using modern sys-admin tools such as Vagrant and Puppet.
Enter Kalabox, a FREE, modern webserver that has a sexy GUI to manage your sites but can also be SSH'ed into and customized. This session explains the deficiencies of existing local development environments and how Kalabox can help improve development workflows for individual developers and organizations alike.
The Stack
Kalabox ships as a one-click MacOSX installer (Windows/Linux in the works) built on Puppet source that runs natively in a Linux virtual box. The server itself includes...
nginx
PHP5 (with common extensions including apc)
MySQL
Apache Solr
Apache Tomcat
Our stack is comparable to the Pantheon stack minus the key performance tools (Varnish, Redis, etc) which makes it a great tool for developing Pantheon sites locally. It is also one of the only stacks that ships with nginx and apache solr by default. Our stack is already built and performance tuned for Drupal, which means that on a local rig it is very fast. Kalabox makes your development cycles more efficient.
The Tools
SSH
git
drush
PHPMyAdmin
webgrind
xdebug
We ship with some standard web tools like git and PHPMyAdmin but we also wrap in webgrind for easy profiling of code and samba to expose your webroot to an IDE that you can run natively on your OS instead of inside a virtual box. If you use Eclipse or Netbeans or another Xdebug-compatible IDE, you can easily debug your code.
The Frontend
Kalabox also provides a node.js MacOSX application frontend so the user can easily spin up new drupal sites, access utilities and tweak their environment.
Pantheon Integration
Kalabox was built with Pantheon in mind and as a consequence kalabox comes with extensive pantheon integration. You can enter your Pantheon user name and password into kalabox and see all your pantheon sites show up in the kalabox dashboard. With one-click ease you can pull down or refresh code, data and files from any of your pantheon sites. You can also choose to build any of your pantheon sites locally. Make the fast and best practices Pantheon experience even faster and MORE best practices by developing locally.
The Consequences
1. Share the same local development environment with other developers.
2. Speed up development
3. Get all the advantages of a modern stack with no sysadmin experience
4. Get a great starting point if you do have sysadmin experience and want to customize your environment
5. Supercharge your Pantheon development workflow.
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Comments
Alec Reynolds replied on Permalink
Co-presenter Added!
LA is too big of a city for just a single presenter, so Kalamuna double-trouble will be landing in Irvine on Saturday :)