I feel like a broken record ... yet again, I was perusing the Internet (this time, Twitter), and then I noticed an illustration—a very familiar one—of the Roman collar (the white collar worn by priests):

A great peace always came over me when I saw the Roman Collar, a rep of the high priest, Jesus Christ, was present pic.twitter.com/9qH5VghciI

— Chris Boutin (@Boutleg) June 15,

I presented an introductory session on Ansible and how it can power Drupal infrastructure management and deployments at DrupalCon Austin 2014. Video and slides from the session, titled DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! , are embedded below:

I'm still recovering from an intense week of Drupal here in Austin, TX. I kicked things off by walking around the downtown area, then taking the intensive Acquia Drupal Developer Certification exam. Once the conference started, I attended a few sessions, met a few awesome Drupalists, and learned a lot. On the last day of the 'Con (the last session, in fact), I presented DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! .

I think the presentation went well, and I heard

tl;dr : I passed, the exam is better than I was expecting, but I still have mixed feelings about Acquia's Drupal Developer Certification program.

When I first heard about Acquia's Drupal Certification Program , I had mixed feelings. For most programming jobs, especially the majority of web-related jobs, a certification doesn't hold a lot of weight. Certifications are often like final exams for a university course—they show that you know a particular set of material , but they don

When I set up new servers, I like to make sure any system messages like cron failures, server issues, or emails that are routed to [email protected] (where 'example.com' is the hostname of the server—meaning emails to that domain will get routed through the server itself and not hit an external MX server unless postfix/sendmail is configured correctly) are sent to my own email address.

It's relatively straightforward to route emails to internal users (like webmaster , root ,

I wrote A First Timer's Guide to DrupalCon two years ago, and 99% of the advice in that post is still relevant. I've been preparing my presentation DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! for a few months now, and since DrupalCon is less than a week away, I thought I'd take a few minutes to supplement the earlier post:

• Introduce yourself. As @amitaibu said earlier this week , "That group you see me with, and you are reluctant to

This post was originally written in 2014, using a technique that only easily allows testing on Ubuntu 12.04; since then, I've been adapting many of my roles (e.g. geerlingguy.apache ) to use a Docker container-based testing approach, and I've written a new blog post that details the new technique: How I test Ansible configuration on 7 different OSes with Docker .

Since I'm now maintaining 37 roles on Ansible Galaxy, there'

Ansible is used to manage most of Midwestern Mac's infrastructure and deployments, and while it's extremely easy to use, there are a couple situations where a project just needs a little code to be updated across two or more servers, from a central Git repository, or from one master application server.

All Git repositories include a hooks folder, which contains sample git hook scripts. Inside this folder are a series of sample hook files like post-commit.sample and pre-rebase.sample . If you