Development Blog

One of the cool new features of Grav 1.7 is the new bin/grav server command that now comes with support for Symfony's PHP-FPM-powered local webserver. While Grav has support PHP's native web server, the Symfony server is faster and even supports SSL out of the box.

To take advantage of this...

A few years ago I setup a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B as a development web server. I took note of the steps involved and over the ensuing months, I've provided those notes to individuals on our Gitter chat looking to do the same thing. I recently purchased the latest Raspberry Pi 3 Model B which has the same form-factor, but has a faster 1.2Ghz quad core processor, built-in WIFI, and Bluetooth 4.1. I thought I would take this opportunity to update my notes, and turn them into a full blown tutorial as this seems to be a popular subject.

In this tutorial, we cover the basics to get Raspbian OS running on your Raspberry Pi computer. We will install the high-performance nginx 1.9 webserver, along with PHP 7.0 for optimal performance. We'll also cover installing the latest Netatalk 3 with spotlight support for easy file sharing with your Mac. So read on dear listener if you would like to discover the joy of building your own full linux-powered server on a $35 computer!

I had originally planned on penning a blog post about how easy it is to setup and deploy a Grav site with ServerPilot with DigitalOcean. While that is a fantastic VPS service, someone on Gitter asked me about setting up Grav on Amazon's AWS, so I checked it out. What I found was pretty amazing. Even the free tier of the EC2 t2.micro package runs Grav like a boss! Combine this with awesome automated setup and server management via ServerPilot, and you have the makings of an unbeatable combination. In this blog post I'll go through step-by-step on how to get this setup on your own. The hardest part is setting up EC2 as it's a bit ungainly, but other than that it's a doddle, and more importantly, it's free!

In some of my earlier blog posts, I outlined the process of setting up a local development environment which involves installing and configuring up a web-server with PHP. This process can become second nature, and is the preferred approach for many developers, but utilizing a web-based IDE is a new option that has many surprising benefits.

Web IDEs have been around for a few years, but only recently with the improvement in browser capabilities, more sophisticated editor capabilities, and the integration of virtual machines, have them become a viable option. For years I watched from afar, and scoffed at being able to do any real development in such an environment, but after a recent round of testing, I have come away impressed!

Read on to find out the many benefits and a walk-through of getting a powerful Grav development environment setup for free!

Back in October I penned a two piece series on setting up Yosemite with Apache with PHP, APC, Virtual Hosts and other goodies. There are other options available however, and one of the more popular ones is to use Vagrant to easily spin up a pre-configured virtual-machine.

In this tutorial, we'll step through the process of getting an RTD (ready-to-develop) environment installed on your Mac, Windows, or Linux desktop.

Most people that are initially developing with Grav either modify the default Antimatter theme directly, or copy-and-rename it, providing a separate theme to modify. Each of these approaches have their own issues.

By modifying the base theme directly, any theme update will potentially overwrite changes made. By copying the theme, the theme will not be overridden, but updates and fixes to the core theme, have to be manually merged over to the copied theme.

There is a much simpler, and much more maintainable method however: Theme Inheritance.

This Special Guest article describes how to deploy (and work with) Grav utilizing Microsoft Azure for hosting and Bitbucket, acting as a source control repository.

In this second part of our two-part series, we will dive into using GitHub to manage our locally-developed site and integrate it with our live production environment. If you have not already done so, please ensure you have a working local Grav site as outlined in Part1 of this series.

So enough blathering, it's time to get our feet wet with GitHub!

As promised, today I'm going to start covering the process of setting up a development environment utilizing GitHub to manage the code throughout the development life cycle, resulting in publishing to a live site.

As I blogged about the other day, as a web developer, the most efficient and more reliable development strategy is to develop locally, then push your local development to your production site. If you have not ready my post on Grav Development Strategy, you might want to read that first.

Over the course of this two-part series, we will cover the process from start to finish, and I hope to show you that this process is one that will enable you to develop and maintain your site more efficiently.