Reproducible Drupal Environments The Easy Way: A Hands-On Look At Using Drupal With Nix & NixOS
Time: Thursday 14th May 09:40-10:10
Room: Waterfront
Track: Web Tools & Complementary Technologies
Take the guesswork out of your CI/CD pipeline with reproducible software builds that result in the exact same environment for everyone, every time-- all without touching containers, udev rules, or virtual environments.
Using Nix, a cross-platform functional package manager, it is possible to develop, deploy, and maintain fully reproducible software environments (and even entire operating systems) with a single text file on native hardware. In this talk we'll explore both the technical and practical aspects of using Nix to handle different parts of the CI/CD pipeline including a new way of solving the "well, it works on my machine" problem, building reproducible Drupal environments you can actually share with your colleagues, and running production-grade Drupal websites on the exact same software platform they were built on.
We'll cover some common pitfalls of modern solutions like Docker and K8s, as well as some of the benefits (and a few unique challenges) that using Nix presents, such as how to work with immutable file systems, how to build truly reproducible software, and the possible impacts of using functional programming in your systems architecture.
Using Nix, a cross-platform functional package manager, it is possible to develop, deploy, and maintain fully reproducible software environments (and even entire operating systems) with a single text file on native hardware. In this talk we'll explore both the technical and practical aspects of using Nix to handle different parts of the CI/CD pipeline including a new way of solving the "well, it works on my machine" problem, building reproducible Drupal environments you can actually share with your colleagues, and running production-grade Drupal websites on the exact same software platform they were built on.
We'll cover some common pitfalls of modern solutions like Docker and K8s, as well as some of the benefits (and a few unique challenges) that using Nix presents, such as how to work with immutable file systems, how to build truly reproducible software, and the possible impacts of using functional programming in your systems architecture.
Speakers
Andrew Benbow
Andrew is a Drupal developer with a keen interest in reproducible software, systems design, and FLOSS computing. He builds and maintains a few Drupal modules including PartyTown and Node Swapper, and he maintains the official implementation of Drupal for NixOS, a Linux-based operating system.