Drupal is one of the most popular PHP based CMS on the market. Trusted by education and government stakeholders worldwide, it offers unmatched flexibility in content management through its powerful granular permissions system, view engine, and ecosystem of modules supported by an active communitySince 2019, I have worked on numerous Drupal projects for clients in the luxury, real estate, education and entertainment sectors. Over the years, I have developed a complete expertise in the development of Drupal sites, from their design to the development of custom themes and modules.Preferring the use of basic modules and those actively maintained by the community (Views, Paragraphs, Blocks, Webform, etc.) to customized solutions that are difficult to maintain over time, I have been proudly contributing to Drupal since 2024 by providing compatibility fixes to the modules that I use during CMS version upgrades.My servicesCustom Drupal theme developmentCustom Drupal modules developmentDrupal site building and architectureMultilingual Drupal websites developmentIntegration of web apps with DrupalUseful linksOfficial site My contributions
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Warming up the Drupal cache when deploying
GitHub Actions is GitHub's solution for building continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Since its arrival in GitHub, I've been using it religiously on every project to facilitate collaboration with other developers and enable shorter deployment cycles.CI/CD pipelines development
When deploying a Drupal project with a continuous deployment pipeline, it is often necessary to rebuild the Drupal cache so that it takes into account the latest file changes.
Problem: While rebuilding the cache ensures that you have the latest server-side changes, it can cause additional slowness when loading pages for the first time while Drupal rebuilds the HTML cache of the various pages, views, etc.
The Drupal Warmer projet
The Warmer module solves this problem. Depending on a schedule via CRON task or manually, it allows to warm up the Drupal cache of a list of URLs defined manually or automatically by retrieving URLs from a sitemap.
Once these URLs are defined, the module loads each associated page, thus allowing them to be re-cache and a fast loading time for their next visits.
Integrating the Drupal Warmer module into a GitHub Actions pipeline
In a previous post I explained how I deploy my Drupal projects with GitHub Actions.
Here is an additional step to add to warm up the Drupal cache via Drush and using the Warmer module:
- name: Warm cache
run: ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no ${{ secrets.SSH_HOST }} "cd /var/www/html && vendor/bin/drush warmer:enqueue entity,sitemap && vendor/bin/drush queue-run warmer"