Drupal on OpenShift

This Git repository helps you get up and running quickly w/ a Drupal 7.x installation on OpenShift. It defaults to using MySQL, so when creating the application you'll want to select and install both MySQL and Cron (for running scheduled tasks).

rhc app create drupal php-5.3 mysql-5.1 cron

The first time you push changes to OpenShift, the build script will download the latest stable version of Drupal (currently 7.x) and install it into the 'downloads' data directory. It will then create and deploy a default profile for your application, using MySQL into your 'sites' directory. Any new modules you add or files uploaded to the site will be placed under this directory. If you want to reconfigure Drupal from a clean state, delete the 'sites' directory (you may need to add write permissions to the sites/default directory, which Drupal automatically makes readonly) and push a non-significant change to your application Git repo.

Because none of your application code is checked into Git and lives entirely in your data directory, if this application is set to scalable the new gears will have empty data directories and won't serve requests properly. If you'd like to make the app scalable, you'll need to:

1. Check the contents of php/* into your Git repository (in the php/* dir)
2. Only install new modules via Drush from the head gear, and then commit those changes to the Git repo
3. Use a background task to copy file contents from gear to gear

All of the scripts used to deploy and configure Drupal are located in the build and deploy hooks.

Using Drush

The Drush management tool for Drupal is automatically installed and you can simply use it while ssh'd into your gear.

rhc ssh drupal
drush --help

Drush has many helpful commands for managing your installation, such as:

drush st			# Show status of Drush and the Drupal site
drush dl <project>	# Download module/theme
drush en <project>	# Enable module/theme
drush dis <project>	# Disable module/theme
drush cc all		# Clear all cache
drush core-cron     # Run cron
drush updb			# Apply database updates

Running on OpenShift

Create an account at https://www.openshift.com

Create a php-5.3 application with MySQL and Cron support.

rhc app create drupal php-5.3 mysql-5.1 cron --from-code=git://github.com/openshift/drupal-quickstart.git

That's it, you can now checkout your application at: http://drupal-$yournamespace.rhcloud.com

The default user is 'admin' and the password should be printed out to console after deployment. Please change the default password after first login.

Updates

You can use Drupal's module management UI to download new versions of modules into your data directory.

Repo layout

php/ - At deploy time, the build script will symlink this directory to a directory containing Drupal
../data - For persistent data
../data/sites - The data for your Drupal site, including settings.php, downloaded modules, and uploaded files
../data/downloads - The most recent version of Drupal.
.openshift/pear.txt - list of pears to install
.openshift/action_hooks/build - Script that gets run every push, just prior to starting your app

Notes about layout

If you create a php directory in your Git repo, it will be served instead of Drupal. The build hook automatically symlinks the installed version of Drupal from your data directory every time you push. The runtime directory in your application is automatically recreated each push, so anything persistent must be in your Git repo or saved and retrieved from the data directory.