Your Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrade will be "insanely" smooth.
With Drupal 9 built in Drupal 8, all there's left for you to do is to remove all deprecated API from your website.
Easier said than done...
Just imagine yourself fine-tooth combing your codebase to:
- identify all errors and fix them, one by one
- identify all deprecated code and remove it, manually, one by one
- apply the same code updates, repetitively, as many times as needed
But what if you could automate deprecated API use removal from your Drupal site?
You can, actually, with Rector-Drupal.
Let's dive into more details on this automation tool for Drupal 8:
1. How You'd Remove Deprecated Code Before Rector
Before we dig into Rector for Drupal 8 — what it is and how it makes your life easier — let's see what's the current way of identifying and removing deprecated code in your Drupal projects:
- first, you upgrade your contrib modules and theme to their latest versions
- next, you run drupal upgrade_status or drupal-check, which will generate a list of all the deprecations on your Drupal site
- for every module on the list, you go to Drupal.org to check whether it will be kept as such, upgraded, or ranked as “deprecated” starting with Drupal 9
- you run the all the patches that you will have found available: basically, you manually fix all the errors detected in your codebase
- you run drupal upgrade_status or drupal-check again to see whether there's any deprecated code still lingering on your Drupal site
Note: if there are multiple instances of one deprecation, you'll need to address it for each and every occurrence.
In short: updating code to get your website Drupal 9-ready — fixing all the errors, removing all the deprecations — means a lot of manual and repetitive work.
You now have Drupal-Rector to automate the whole process.
2. From Rector to Drupal 8 Rector, to Drupal-Rector
Drupal-Rector, the Palantir's tool for automating code updates and streamline the Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 process, didn't come out of anywhere, you know.
2.1. What Is Rector?
"A reconstructor tool- it does instant upgrades and instant refactoring of your code." (Github.com)
It's designed (by Tomas Votruba) to automatically:
- run PHP code and framework updates
- improve your code with code quality and code style fixes
Source: Github.com
2.2. And What Is Drupal 8 Rector?
“... the missing bridge to enable automated code upgrades from Drupal 8 to 9” (Palanatir.net)
As Rector didn't yet have any support for Drupal 8, Dezső Biczó at Pronovix decided to build Rector for Drupal 8.
Source: Github.com
Source: Pronovix.com
2.3. What Is Drupal-Rector?
The Palantir team took over from there and introduced their own version of the Rector for Drupal tool.
Each rule will upgrade the code corresponding to a specific deprecated API in use on your Drupal website.
The 2 obvious benefits of using it on your Drupal projects, as you get them ready for the Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrade, are:
- you streamline the whole process
- you reduce the upgrade costs (just think of all the time that you'd otherwise invest in addressing every single deprecation issue, one by one; even if the same issue appears in different areas of your codebase)
3. How Do You Use Drupal-Rector?
They have a step-by-step guide on Github on how to set up your code updating process using this automation tool:
- you give your code a deep-scan using Rector and analyze the code fixes that it suggests you to make
- you go ahead and... apply those fixes
Source: Drupal.org
4. Why Incorporate Drupal-Rector into Your Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 Upgrade
Now, let's talk... benefits.
- to fix code quality issues
- to upgrade your PHP version
- to upgrade from Simfony 3 to Symfony 4
- to Rename classes, properties, methods, namespaces or constants
- to remove deprecated API
Source: Palantir.net
5. Drupal-Rector: What's Next?
In other words: what should you expect from this tool in the nearest future?
The Palantir team's plan is to create 15 rules standing for the most common deprecations in Drupal 8.
Source: Palantir.net
The END!
What do you think of this automation tool aimed at jump-starting your Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrade?
Have you used it? Would you use it?
Are there any specific code error or deprecation issues you wish it addressed?
Photo by Danial RiCaRoS on Unsplash