Drupal is pretty expensive to host and maintain. There is already work well under way to address this with automatic updates and project browser. It’s great, and it’s not enough. What if we could ship drupal with a production-ready webserver that can handle real-time features? What if we could make HTTPS certificate management easier? What if we could significantly improve the performance of Drupal?
Exactly 2 years ago I started to talk about how can drupal scale down and in 2 years things have changed! Last week I attended the very interesting (and well organized) Drupalcamp Rennes 2024 where I saw Kévin Dunglas give a talk about FrankenPHP: The Modern PHP App Server, written in Go. Turns out the last two point on my “drupal scale down” have a solution: it can replace apache/php-fpm and be distributed as a single executable. I haven’t tested it yet, it’s possible to bundle server and application code to ship everything in one executable.
Drupal has always been about giving people more power than they expect (or even want in some cases…). On the content management side of things we’re very, very advanced, even if some interfaces and interactions can look and feel a bit dated. Defining content types, creating custom fields, workflows, content listing, layouts, decoupled, media library, and more we’ve been doing that for a long time, we have a very wide range of modules for practically any use case you can think of. And the vast majority of the modules work together without conflicts, and they’re all free.
What I would like to see is Drupal using FrankenPHP in the worker mode as the default way to put Drupal on production. This will make it possible to host Drupal more easily. Hook the included webserver to a startup/monitoring script (we’ll give examples) and you’re ready to serve the website. No need to install apache, nginx, or even PHP!
Now you can use the server to power your real-time features, without having to write or maintain a separate nodejs server, all in PHP. If we make sure Drupal can work in the worker mode, there won’t be a performance issue for this either. Without doing anything you’ll get a performance boost for all your users thanks to early hints, your CSS and JS will start loading before the HTML even arrives from the server. To get there we need a few steps:
Right now I need help making the DDEV integration work well with the recommended version of FrankenPHP, and making this
available to the Drupal testbot. If you have a Drupal website using DDEV you can already try it out with
ddev get theodoreb/ddev-frankenphp-drupal && ddev restart and it should mostly work (with some https problems for now).
I would love to know what you think, leave a comment or let’s chat in #drupal slack.
If you’re interested in sponsoring me to work on this or other Drupal things, that would be great!
Amey Mudras and Govind Kumar Malu at DrupalSouth 2024 Amey and Govind’s session at DrupalSouth 2024 focused on simplifying the complex web of structures in Drupal and explored how consolidating components into a single directory can be a game-changer for projects. Attendees left the session armed with practical insights that can be immediately applied to enhance their Drupal projects. View the presentation description on the DrupalSouth websiteMing Quah at DrupalSouth 2024 Ming’s DrupalSouth 2024 presentation was on Day 2 of the event. The session gave attendees an overview of the NIST domains and showed what Drupal developers and DevOps specialists should do to comply with the NIST CSF. The framework was analysed in the context of seven key layers for Drupal security. View the presentation description on DrupalSouth websiteSuchi Garg at DrupalSouth 2024 Suchi’s workshop at DrupalSouth 2024 on Day 2 prepared first-time contributors for the code sprint. The session focused on the dynamics of mentored contribution and explored the benefits and types of contribution, tooling and documentation, and more. View the presentation description on the DrupalSouth websiteSteve Worley at DrupalSouth 2024 Steve’s second session at DrupalSouth 2024 (Day 2) was as a co-presenter with Joseph Zhao from GovCMS. They took attendees through how they test and ensure that government websites are strong, safe and easy to use. The presentation also covered practical testing methods and tools that will help government agencies deliver high-quality digital services. View the presentation description on the DrupalSouth websiteGaurav Garg and Govind Kumar Malu at DrupalSouth 2024 Gauravg and Govind’s session was on Day 2 of DrupalSouth 2024 and took attendees through Drupal testing using Cypress and automation. The session showcased practical examples that illustrate how Cypress commands interact with Drupal sites. Attendees learned strategies for executing tests, analysing results and maintaining synchronisation between evolving Drupal applications and the test suite. View the presentation description on the DrupalSouth website