Environments module

This module attempts to solve the problem of executing repetive tasks when switching between different server environments, such as development, staging or production.

It inroduces 3 new concepts:

• Environments
• Tasks
• Task Bundles

Environments

An environment is a Drupal object (a CTools Exportable to be more specific) which represents a server environment, such as "production", "staging", "development" and so on.

The environment object has a name, optional alias, settings and any number of tasks. All defined environments can be managed in: Administration -> Configuration -> Development -> Environments.

Current Environment

Having defined one or more environments, you can now switch your site between them.

You can view the current environment in your site's Status Report or in the settings page: Administration -> Configuration -> System -> Site Environment

Only one environment can be active at any given time and, when an environment becomes active, it's tasks are executed in order.

You can manually switch your site's active environment at any given time either in the Admin UI described above or by using the handy Drush command: drush environments, or drush env for short:

	# View documentation.
	drush environments --help


	
# View all defined environments.
		drush env

	
# Switch to the "dev" environment.
		drush env dev

Tasks

Environment Tasks are operations such as enabling or disabling a module or changing a variable's value, that are executed when an environment becomes active.

Once you've created an environment at Administration -> Configuration -> Development -> Environments, you can configure it's tasks by going to it's "Manage Tasks" page.

It's important to note that you can drag the tasks around to re-arrange them and that they will run in the exact order in which they appear.

The following tasks are available out of the box:

• Clear caches
• Delete variable
• Disable module(s)
• Enable module(s)
• Execute callback
• Execute Drush command
• Execute Rules component
• Import Migrations
• Revert Feature(s)
• Roll-back Migrations
• Set variable value
• Uninstall module(s)

Task Bundles

The included "Environments Bundles" module enables Task Bundles, which are nothing more than one or more tasks, grouped together.

Bundles are virtually identical to Environments except for 2 major differences:

• Bundles don't have an "active" state like Environments
• Unlike Environments, you can execute all of a Bundle's tasks on demand (with Environments you'd have to make that Environment active to have it's tasks execute)

Task Bundles may be executed in the Admin UI described above or by using the handy Drush command: drush environments-bundle, or drush envb for short:

	# View documentation.
	drush environments-bundle --help


	
# Execute "foo" bundle.
		drush envb foo

The Environments Bundles module also enables a new task:

• Execute Task Bundle

Yo dawg, I heard you like bundles, so this task can be added to Environments as well as Task Bundles, so you can have a bundle that executes another bundle (but not itself because that would be bundle inception).

Drush

In order to use the task that executes a Drush command, you must first configure the path to Drush in the settings form: Administration -> Configuration -> System -> Site Environment

You must insert the absolute path to the executable and, if it contains spaces you must manually escape them, for example: /Applications/Dev\ Desktop/drush/drush

The following documentation page from the Migrate module has pretty good instructions for getting a very similar Drush integration working (this one is totally ripped off theirs actually!): https://www.drupal.org/node/1958170

All you have to do is replace the variable name migrate_drush_path in the instructions with ours environments_drush. In fact, if you already have Migrate configured, we will borrow from their config to initialize ours when you enable the module so you won't have to do anything!

Suggested Usage

The optimal way of working with Environments, particularly when maintaining multiple sites, each with their own somewhat yet not entirely similar set of modules, is to leverage Task Bundles to create smaller, more manageable sets of tasks targetted at a particular functionality, module or module suite:

    AdvAgg Production Bundle
	* Enable AdvAgg + submodules
	* Enable JS Compression using JSMin extension

	AdvAgg Staging Bundle
	* Enable AdvAgg + submodules
	* Enable JS Compression using JSMin+

	AdvAgg Development Bundle
	* Disable AdvAgg + submodules

The above example is very simple but it demonstrates reasonably well how you may apply different settings to different environments in a real-life situation.

Grouping your tasks into targetted bundles also allows them to be more easily re-used amongst other projects where there might be small differences (ie: no CDN) and that alone means for example that the "Production" environment of a site with a CDN couldn't be shared with a site that didn't use it.

However, using bundles we can simple add the bundles we want to our environments and manage tasks in a much more streamlined manner:

    Production Environment Tasks
	* Execute "AdvAgg Production Bundle"
	* Execute "CDN Production Bundle"
	* Execute "Disable Debug Bundle"
	* Execute "Enable Caching Bundle"

	Development Environment Tasks
	* Execute "AdvAgg Development Bundle"
	* Execute "CDN Development Bundle"
	* Execute "Enable Debug Bundle"
	* Execute "Disable Caching Bundle"

Environments API

If you are familiar with CTools Plugins, creating a new Environments Task should be pretty straight-forwards!

@TODO write this for now check out the existing tasks! :)