June Features Update

June has been a busy month again at Platform.sh!

Maybe you have seen us at the following events:

• WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna where Ori worked with some hard-core Drupalistas
• Viva Technology 2016 in Paris where our moon-man continued his mission to deploy to the moon

Or maybe you have heard that we hired 4 new collaborators on our team. You can see them on our company team page.

In the mean time, we continuously worked on our core product to squeeze more performance and improve its overall robustness.

We also released a bunch of new features and enhancements. Here is a non exhaustive listing of what has been happening.

The Web Interface

As usual, we’re putting lots of effort improving the usability of Platform.sh which starts with what you can see.

The web UI has been greatly improved over the last month and here are some of the new features you can see:

• Proper user warning before enabling email sending
• Proper user warning before deactivating an environment
• Ability to hide and regroup inactive environments in the sidebar (this has been asked often over the support :) )
• Improve display of variables easier reading and avoid text wrapping
• Autofocus input field when branching an environment
• Automatic refresh of the project dropdown listing when changing the project title

We’ve also fixed multiple bugs:

• Access links breaking during build
• Wrong JSON display in the error alerts
• Broken links when exiting project setup early
• CSS animation issue on activity update
• Padding issue on warning window

Services & Runtimes

We usually don’t say much about these. As we continuously keep those updated (security updates happen on-the-fly) and we make sure this stays transparent to our users (as much as softwarely possible we don’t introduce breaking changes…) but here are some highlights from the previous month:

• Introduce a new  PLATFORM_PROJECT_ENTROPY  environment variable which has a random value, stable throughout the project’s life. This can be used for Drupal hash salt (see the example here).
• Expose the hostname and IP address of each service in the  PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS  environment variable.
• Update MongoDB client to 3.2.7, Node.js to 4.4.5, Blackfire plugin to 1.10.6, Nginx to 1.11.1.

The CLI

We’ve also implemented a lot of new features to the CLI based your feedbacks and ideas:

• Allow the update check interval to be overridden via  ~/.platformsh/config.yaml
• Sort projects and environments in  project:list  and  environment:list  with new  --sort  and  --reverse  options
• Add  platform multi  command, to execute arbitrary commands on multiple projects
• Add  platform create  command to create new projects from the CLI
• Allow the API token to be set via a file specified in  ~/.platformsh/config.yaml
• Create a settings.local.php for Drupal + Composer
• Use chmod to force deleting builds even when files are read-only
• Symlink all mounts, from the build to shared directories
• Remove minimum Drush version check
• Pass verbosity options on to Composer during build
• Add autocompletion and other improvements for  user:role
• Shared mount symlinks now overwrite existing files in the build
• Ignore whitespace in the user-specified API token file

For more informations, you can access the public CLI Releases on GitHub.

Drupal 8 with Composer

In our quest to promote development best practices, we’ve converted our Drupal 8 example repository to work with Composer on PHP 7.

Read more about it in Larry’s blog post.