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Over 3000 reasons to come to the Drupal South 2019 sprint

The 2019 Drupal South sprint is shaping up to be the biggest contribution event in the Australia-Pacific region since Drupalcon Sydney 2013.

This year, core-contributors with over 3000 commit credits between them will be in attendance, including 3 members of the core committers team, 3 members of the Drupal security team, 7 core module/subsystem maintainers as well as maintainers of major contrib modules and command-line tools.

With Drupal 9 just around the corner, this will be a great chance to help the community get popular modules ready for Drupal 9, meet some great people and help shape the future of Drupal.

The PreviousNext team are sponsoring and helping to run the sprint day on Wednesday, November 27th 2019, and there are a few things you can do now to hit the ground running on the day.

by lee.rowlands /

What's a Sprint Day about anyway?

Contribution Sprints are a great opportunity to get involved in contributing to Drupal. Contributions don't have to be just about code. Issue triage, documentation, and manual testing are examples of non-code contributions.

If you are new to contributing, you can take a look at the New Contributor tasks on the Drupal.org Contributor Tasks page.

While there will be experienced contributors there on the day to help, keep in mind, this is not a training session. :-)

Set Up a Development Environment

There is more than one way to shear a sheep, and there is also more than one way to set up a local development environment for working on Drupal.

If you don't already have a local development environment setup, we recommend using Docker Compose for local development - follow the instructions for installing Docker Compose on OSX, Windows and Linux.

Once you've setup Docker compose, you need to setup a folder containing your docker-compose.yml and a clone of Drupal core. The instructions for that vary depending on your operating system, we have instructions below for OSX, Windows and Linux, although please note the Windows version is untested.

Mac OSX

mkdir -p ~/dev/drupal
cd ~/dev/drupal
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/larowlan/9ba2c569fd52e8ac12aee962cc9319c9/raw/e69795e7219c9c73eb8d8d171c31277eeb5bcbaa/docker-compose.yml
git clone --branch 8.9.x https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git app
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose run -w /data/app app composer install

Windows

git clone --branch 8.9.x https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git app
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose run -w /data/app app composer install

Linux

mkdir -p ~/dev/drupal # or wherever you want to put the folder
cd ~/dev/drupal
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/larowlan/63a0f6efacee71b483af3a2184178dd0/raw/248dff13557efa533c0ca297d39c87cd3eb348fe/docker-compose.ymlgit clone --branch 8.9.x https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git app
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose exec app /bin/bash -c "cd /data/app && composer install"

If you have any issues, join us on Drupal slack in the #australia-nz channel beforehand and we'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Install dreditor browser extension

Dreditor is a browser extension that makes it easier to review patches on Drupal.org. Its a must for anyone contributing to Drupal.

There are versions for Firefox and Chrome.

Find Issues to Work On

If you want to see what might be an interesting issue to work on, head over to the Drupal.org Issue Queue and look for issues tagged with 'DrupalSouth 2019'. These are issues that others have tagged.

You can also tag an issue yourself to be added to the list.

Being face-to-face with fellow contributors is a great opportunity to have discussions and put forward ideas. Don't feel like you need to come away from the day having completed lines and lines of code.

We look forward to seeing you all there!