In which I talk to myself a lot

More on setting up my first Drupal/Git/Drush site...

I've opted to ignore the multitudinous potential php settings for now, and am hoping things just work for the moment. Otherwise I'll keep procrastinating by fussing with server settings forever. I did find that my php version is easily changed by clicking edit on a domain in the dreamhost panel. And then my Drupal install moseys along much better.

If someone wanted to drop me a lecture/note about how I shouldn't be toying with D8 on a live server because [security] I'd actually be curious to know more.

Oh here we are, the php.ini wiki page for dreamhost: "We seriously aren't kidding about this" edition. Okay, yeah, still going to try not to mess with it for now. SO, moving along. Complete install using appropriate database. tum tetum.

Got hostname right, port default appears ok. Dreamhost phpmyadmin seems to have organized my dbs using the underscore I dropped in to differentiate test and production dbs. Hoping that's not a problem. Totally writing things to db now! whee. This is so nerve wracking, given how frequently things seem to break. Then I'll have to go back and clone to my root directory for my site, too, but not until I have something worth having up front.

meh, nuts. Admin menu doesn't display, just shows "array." Works fine on local. Maybe I'm not doing this quite right if things are that different. Also the whole thing is slow as all get out. oh, I needed to clear my cache. When did drush cc all go the way of the dodo? It's hard to keep up with a learning curve that keeps doing loop-the-loops.

ehhh I got distracted working frontend site building and haven't been keeping notes! I still can't get my search block to display, not sure why. Finally got my blog view to display the grid first by disabling the contextual filter (tho I'm still not sure why it was showing "3 2014" instead of "May 2014").

Now need to get my drush site aliases up and working so I can push the db up and see what happens. I suppose I might as well be doing my dev on my /test directory, since I'm not really doing dev so much as design. Heaven help me if I ever get to the theming part of the program here. At least my concept is super simple and minimalist. For now. Now where did I put my sketches?

Or I could just export the dang db and import it to the remote and deal with it later when I have slightly more time. It bothers me to do this the "wrong" way, though. Ok, export, import check. Then I just need to... definitely not the most elegant way to do this. Kinda broke things. Totally lost track of my git system. Maybe I should just get my site-aliases to work.

Note to self: fix things with chmod u+w. Finally got back to close to where I started by copying settings.php over. Somewhat easier to follow instructions for site aliases here. That plus the instructions in example.aliases.drushrc.php. 

Dreamhost specific Drush install instructions!? yes! ... no. That installs the old Drush, I need Drush 7, which requires composer, which requires that the php phar extension be enabled, which it isn't. Seriously, you've got to be kidding me. I just want to sync my database! Ok, got the phar extension working, though I *really* don't understand why it wasn't. See also (again) Dreamhost's wiki here on php settings.

Finally got Drush on the remote, more or less. So now running drush @test status locally at least comes up with a different result... "Drush 7.0-dev does not support Drupal" and "Fatal error: Call to undefined function conf_path() in /home/[me]/.composer/vendor/drush/drush/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 783" ...what? ok, maybe I need to do my alias a little different, can't get that until I run the install script again on the remote? Do I even remember how to do this part anymore?? ok, got drush site-alias @self copied, added to my drushrc.php locally, eventually got rid of a stray paren that was really messing things up, and finally drush @test status works!

... now I can try syncing my dbs. Which fails on the first try with "Error: no database record could be found for source @dev." erm. Ok, so both @dev and @test pass drush sql-conf. That's good. ...I'm completely at my wits end here. HELP.

And then I can set up an alias for my production site, which I haven't even provisioned or whatever yet- need to clone to site root, install, set up alias, and sync. Right? That should be easy at this point. ...right?

Eventually I will get to theming!

Useful things I just did

Environment setup for ssh stuff on my server. Eventually found and edited my bash_profile. Remembered how to vi and unix properly. Can't remember what I was originally trying to do.

Setting up SSH. Basic stuff. Understanding SSH.

Oh yeah, here's where I started, Drupal on Dreamhost.

/me clambers back out of rabbit hole to find a new one to explore...

oh, and adding an alias to my bash_profile alias ll='ls -la' for more verbose file listings. Cause otherwise I can't *see* .bashrc, say, without at least ls -a.

Crash course: clone local, push to server, bam, test site.

More or less. Reminder: Installing Drupal. Includes db setup.

Page two of install gives me "no data from server." ... what? the first page is fine, but I click "english" and it gives up? It's not even a WSOD!

Sweet bunnies. Upgraded MAMP, again, broke things. Eventually remembered to change my mysql password in /Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php (I had changed it away from 'root' at some point, for obvious reasons).

wooo finally got through the install script. Since I've only done core stuff before I don't really know what all I should use for a production site- username, site name, that sort of stuff. Just going to wing it.

So this is probably one of those stupid questions, but do I have to go through the install script every time I push up from dev to stage and prod?

So trying to push from my local dev environment to my test directory on my dreamhost server: fails, gives me a fatal, no directory, not a git repo message. I think I just had my ssh url written wrong, so switched from ssh://user@server/files/stuff.git to user@server:files/stuff.git and that seems to work. But now I'm not quite sure what that did for me- "This directory is not the working tree, where you edit and commit code. Rather, it is simply the central location for the git objects and history..." ok, so I still need to clone from there to test site. hm.

ok, so now that I'm drawn myself a nice diagram of where my branches and repos and whatnot are, plus associated dbs, I think I can keep moving along... somewhere I had a thing for using drush to keep sites synched... Can't handle adding that into the mix right now, just going to try getting my site up and running first.

With a little help from the git pages, cloning into mysite/test so I can try just a plain install on a live site with a real db. Then I just need to figure out how to pull the db back to local (I think an export will have to do for now, lest I find myself in hours of drush trouble).

... I should really probably be doing this with D7, not a totally random variety of D8. I'll just hit mysite/test and run through the install script real quick... My php installation is too old??? you can't be serious. *checks dreamhost info* ... php 5.2.17.

*Head-desk*

Nobody say anything. TBC after some coffee, methinks.