Drupal.org blog: What’s new on Drupal.org - Q1 2023

Read our roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

Editor's note from Tim Lehnen(hestenet): A Q1 update in September? What's the deal?

The Drupal Association has recently undertaken a variety of new initiatives to accelerate innovation in the Drupal project, and to begin expanding our capacity and capabilities by seeking grant funding. Unfortunately this has meant my personal capacity has been degraded, and I'm afraid I just fell off the wagon of posting these regular updates. I want to thank my colleague Alex Moreno for stepping into the gap to get this news flowing out to all of you again! Now on to the update!

Drupal recognized as a Digital Public Good!

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The Digital Public Good registry recognizes digital goods, including open source software, that advance the Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations. This recognition supports the Association's broader mission to support the Open Web, and should give users of Drupal in the public sector even greater confidence in their choice. 

We want to thank the community volunteers who worked with the Drupal Association to make this happen!

Read the news: Drupal recognized as a Digital Public Good

Securing AutoUpdates OSTIF.org Partnership

The Drupal.org secure signing infrastructure for Automatic Updates and Project Browser is now in testing, with the leads on those projects. 

The Drupal Association has reached out to the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund to identify a partner to audit PHP TUF and Rugged, the two key software libraries being used to secure the Drupal.org supply chain for Automatic Updates and the Project Browser.

For an initiative as critical as applying automatic updates, external validation from a security vendor is critical.

OSTIF.org was previously involved in arranging the security audits for Python TUF and several other implementations of the framework, making them an ideal partner. 

GitLab CI templates

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Any project that opts in to using GitLab CI can now take advantage of an off-the-shelf .gitlab-ci.yml template that configures testing to follow core development. This template uses include files maintained by the Drupal Association on an ongoing basis.

We expect to open GitLabCI to every project on Drupal.org at DrupalCon Pittsburgh. 

Having a template that we could centrally maintain was essential to being able to enable GitLab CI for every project, as many Drupal.org project maintainers are not CI experts. 

This makes the migration much easier.

GitLab Issue Credit

After scaffolding out our plan to manage contribution credit in GitLab, we have implemented a full development prototype, which allows a credit node to be created on modern Drupal, with a webhook from a bot-created comment on GitLab.

This allows us to create and store contribution credit information from an external source, and could even be expanded beyond GitLab.

This clears one of the final barriers to completing our tooling migration to GitLab.

With GitLab CI nearly ready for every project, and a solution for credit fully prototyped, our last major step is to solve the issue workflow (see the next topic).

GitLab Issue Migration

With a solution for credit in pre-production, and GitLabCI about to roll-out to all projects the next phase is to move forward with migrating projects to GitLab issues.

The key problem to solve is shared access to issue forks. In Drupal, we're used to being able to collaborate with each other by default. In GitLab (and GitHub and most other tools) collaborators typically have to manually request access, or fork into a private workspace.

We are going to use an issue bot and webhooks to create simple tools for contributors to collaborate.

Moving to GitLab is part of our commitment to removing friction from the Drupal contribution process, and helps us to keep up to date in the latest innovations in code collaboration platforms.

However, we still lead compared to these platforms in collaborative workflow. 

In fact, GitLab's own new 'Community Fork' experiment looks to implement ideas we pioneered in a GitLab context. Bringing these two ideas together is the best of both worlds

Events.Drupal.org on Drupal 9, pending Drupal 10 update

Events.drupal.org was the first drupal.org property to be updated to Drupal 9, and is in prep to be upgraded to Drupal 10 when the final contributed module is ready. 

Up next:

Drupal.org is historically one of the last sites to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. This is because we have a lot of unique project infrastructure that is not in use by other Drupal end users, and so is likely the last functionality be ported. 

Upgrading the events site gave us a greater than 5x improvement in performance, with improved caching behavior, better editorial tools, and is battle-testing our new k8s based hosting cluster.

Improvements to anti-spam controls on Drupal.org registration

We've made changes to Drupal.org's anti-spam protection that detect bot-like behavior or repeated account creation. 

These changes decouple the anti-spam/anti-bot behavior from the account registration process, an important step so that we can move to a new Single Sign On system for Drupal.org.

Every moment spent on cleaning up spam is a moment not spent on Drupal contribution, and so it is a critically important if often invisible part of our work to protect and moderate Drupal.org.

We also thank the volunteer Drupal site moderators for their work to support this effort.

Multiple performance improvements (and bug fixes) to our GitLab installation.

GitLab has feature releases and security releases every month, and keeping git.drupalcode.org up to date is an important part of the work we do. 

In the first quarter of 2023, several of these updates introduced unexpected performance issues, having to do with repository file sizes, replication, etc.

We were able to work with the upstream maintainers of GitLab itself to resolve these issues, and improve the overall performance of git.drupalcode.org

As always, we’d like to thank all the volunteers who work with us and the Drupal Association Supporters who help to fund our work. In particular, we want to thank: 

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https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/whats-new-on-drupalorg-q1-2023
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