Skip to main content

Blog

Drupal Forms using ajax breaking dependency injection

Recently, I was building a custom Drupal form that used dependency injection and included an ajax submit handler. While testing the form, on the initial page load, the form submitted just fine using ajax. However, when the user used another ajax handler on the same form, all of the injected services were set to `NULL`.


New Year, New Freight Shipping module for Drupal Commerce

Over the New Year's holiday I had some time to work on a new custom module for Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce 2. Introducing the R&L Carriers, LTL Freight shipping module:

https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce_rl_carriers

The new module integrates with RL Carriers online B2B tools and provides real time freight quotes based on your products weight.


Forcing all menu links to use absolute links in Drupal 8

In a recent project, we were using an external service that pulls our site into their system and injects their content into our project. The issue we ran into was that the third party was overwriting all links in the template we provided with their HTTP host, causing the menu system from our Drupal site to break. To get around this we needed to generate absolute links for all of our menus.

In order to accomplish this we used template_preprocess() to dynamically provide our site's hostname as a variable:


Postfix Message Queue: Delete messages from a specific sender and to a specific recipient

I arrived this morning to a Postfix mail queue with more than 14,000 messages queued up. After inspecting the queue with

postqueue -p

I found that most of the messages were from a single spammer to a specific user. In order to clear the queue of these spam messages, I found the following bash script to delete all messages from a single sender to a single user:


Custom validation of multiple, dependent entity fields in Drupal 8

Drupal 8 custom validation of multiple entity fields

In a recent Drupal 8.6 project, I was using the media entity type to add custom fields to pdf documents. These pdf files contain two fields: a select list and a text field. When a specific select option is chosen, the text field becomes required. I could have used a form alter function to add my custom validation for these fields, but this would limit my validation to just one form. This wouldn't work for entities that were created with JSON API or other methods.


Drupal 8: Change the user registration form to a multi-step form.

I was tasked with breaking the user registration form of a Drupal 8 installation into a multi-step form. This was necessary because depending on what a user selected in step one, they were shown different form fields in step two.

To begin, I added all of the fields I needed to the user profile using the GUI. (/admin/config/people/accounts/fields). Then, I added the fields I needed to the manage form display/register tab (/admin/config/people/accounts/form-display/register).


Content vs. Configuration

In Drupal, content is defined as "Information meant to be displayed on your site, and edited by users: article, basic page, images, files, etc.". Configuration, on the other hand, is defined as "Information about your site that is not content and changes infrequently, such as the name of your site, the content types and views you have defined, etc.".


Ubuntu Error Rebooting

Today we noticed a weird error where our CMS software was unable to write files to the server. Upon investigating, it appears the /tmp directory filled up the hard drive, which prevented file writes to the server.

We rebooted the server and it took 20-30 minutes to reboot. The AWS boot logs were saying:

"A start job is running for Create Volatile files and directories"

As it turns out, the /tmp directory is only cleared on reboot. Since there were so many temporary files on the disk, it took that long for the server to delete the files before coming back online.


SSL Certificate Revoked

Today I had a client call and say their website wasn't loading under SSL. When browsing to the site, we got the error "This organization's certificate has been revoked."

So, I quickly setup a new certificate for them using letsencrypt.org, which got the site back online. However, figuring out why the certificate was revoked is still a mystery.

I came upon this post to check the original certificates status.


Rebuilding a TMGMT Job File

Today I had the need to regenerate an HTML file that was generated via the Translation Management Tool (TMGMT). Essentially, the HTML file that I needed to export was escaping all of the HTML tags. After fixing this, I needed to re-export the HTML file. TMGMT doesn't give you the option for this, for good reason, but since we hadn't imported anything yet, it was safe for us to do this.


CURL Upload a file to a Drupal Form

In order to upload a file to a Drupal form, you need to be sure to include the hidden form_id input. After that, it is just a matter of using the name of the html element. The code looks like this: [geshifilter-bash] curl -X POST -F 'form_id=MY_DRUPAL_FORM_ID' -F 'files[xml]=@/path/to/my/file.txt' https://www.example.com/path/to/form[/geshifilter-bash]