Drupal 8 CI/CD with Docker via CircleCI. Part 1: Integration

Published in

Wodby blog

3 min readOct 12, 2016

THIS ARTICLE IS OUTDATED: please see new article “New deployment method — CI/CD via third-party CI”

In this article I will demonstrate how to organize CI workflow for your Drupal 8 website with Docker. We will use CircleCI as our CI/CD tool and docker4drupal containers for test environment.

This article will consist of two parts. In the first part we will set up our CircleCI build. During the build we will spin up testing environment with docker4drupal containers and run a few test suites (both unit and functional) from Drupal core.

In the second part, we will prepare the deployment tarball (archive with the code) and upload it to AWS S3. Then we deploy a new docker-based environment for Drupal and deliver there our tarball.

Part 1: Continuous Integration

First, we need to add a project to CircleCI. I’m going to use my public drupal repository from GitHub (fork of the official Drupal repository). Once you add your project CircleCI will automatically launch build process on every commit.

Test Environment

Add the following docker-compose.yml file to your repository, it’s a simplified version of docker4drupal:

version: "2"

services:
  mariadb:
    image: wodby/drupal-mariadb
    environment:
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: 1
      MYSQL_DATABASE: drupal
      MYSQL_USER: drupal
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: drupal

  php:
    image: wodby/drupal-php:7.0
    environment:
      PHP_SITE_NAME: dev
      PHP_HOST_NAME: localhost:8000
      SIMPLETEST_BASE_URL: http://nginx
      SIMPLETEST_DB: mysql://drupal:drupal@mariadb/drupal
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html

  nginx:
    image: wodby/drupal-nginx
    environment:
      NGINX_SERVER_NAME: localhost
      NGINX_UPSTREAM_NAME: php
      DRUPAL_VERSION: 8
    volumes_from:
      - php

docker-compose.yml file defines a set of services/containers for our test environment. Besides PHP we need MariaDB and Nginx containers because we will run functional tests and they require a database and a web server. For the same reason we add two variables for Simpletest in PHP container.

As you can see we don’t expose any public ports and have no volume for the database. We don’t need it because our environment will be used only for tests during the build.

CircleCI Build Setup

Add the following circle.yml file to your repository for manual build setup:

machine:
  pre:
    - curl -sSL https://s3.amazonaws.com/circle-downloads/install-circleci-docker.sh | bash -s -- 1.10.0
  services:
    - docker
dependencies:
  pre:
    - rm /opt/circleci/php/$(phpenv global)/etc/conf.d/xdebug.ini
  override:
    - sudo pip install docker-compose
    - docker-compose up -d mariadb
    - docker-compose up -d nginx
test:
  pre:
    - composer global require "hirak/prestissimo:^0.3"
    - composer require "wikimedia/composer-merge-plugin:~1.3" --no-interaction
    - composer update -n
    - composer update -n -d ./scripts
    - sudo chown -R 82:82 .
  override:
    - docker-compose run --user 82 php vendor/bin/phpunit -c core core/tests/Drupal/Tests/Core/Password/PasswordHashingTest.php
    - docker-compose run --user 82 php vendor/bin/phpunit -c core core/tests/Drupal/KernelTests/Component/Utility/SafeMarkupKernelTest.php
    - docker-compose run --user 82 php vendor/bin/phpunit -c core core/tests/Drupal/FunctionalTests/Breadcrumb/Breadcrumb404Test.php

Let’s quickly go through the sections:

machine: we install docker version 1.10 (default 1.8 doesn’t work for us)
dependencies: In the dependencies we disable xdebug (for performance reasons), install docker compose and spin up mariadb and nginx services defined in our docker-compose.yml file
test: first, we fetch Drupal’s dependencies via composer and fetch dependencies for Wodby PHP SDK in ./scripts directory. We change ownership to user 82, it’s a www-data user id inside of the php/nginx containers. In the override section we launch 4 test suites (unit and functional) from Drupal core’s