DKAN Starter Overview

DKAN Starter provides two main functions:

  1. Tools for an Agile development workflow
  2. Tools for updating DKAN, Drupal, and Contributed Drupal modules and 3rd party libraries

Agile Workflow

DKAN Starter is part of an agile workflow for creating DKAN sites. That workflow walks through the following stages:

  1. Feature Request
    • A feature request is created from a stakeholder
  2. User Stories
    • The feature is translated into user stories
  3. Feature Implementation
    • Behat tests created with the user stories
    • Feature branch created to work on the feature
    • Developers use their local development environment to work on the feature
    • A pull request is created when the feature is ready for review
  4. Quality Assurance
    • Passing tests are verified on the pull request
    • Project Owner, Project Manager, or stakeholder verifies the feature is complete

DKAN Starter provides integrations with the following tools to facilitate this workflow:

  • Github for VCS and project management
  • CircleCI for tests
  • Ahoy for simplifying our CLI commands
  • Probo for quality assurance
  • Docker for local development
  • Acquia for hosting and deployment

All of these tools can be switched out by updating the ahoy commands that implement each part of the workflow.

DKAN Updates

DKAN Starter serves as an upstream for client projects. DKAN Starter is updated with a new release as soon as a new version of DKAN is released. DKAN releases updates frequently as patch releases for security updates and bug fixes.

Without proper management updating a Drupal or DKAN site quickly can be very difficult. DKAN Starter provides a single command to create an updated branch when a DKAN version is released and tests and quality assurance sites to quickly verify updates are successful.

Config/

All of the development for DKAN Starter implementers is done in the config/ folder. Everything outside of the config/ folder will be overwritten after every update. Granicus provides updates to DKAN Starter immediately after DKAN patch or minor releases or after an update to DKAN Starter. Implementers can simply run the command ahoy build update DKAN-STARTER-VERSION to get the latest version of DKAN and DKAN Starter.