For developers

All \Fetcher\Site class (the main, top level, class) methods are intended to work in a declarative, rather than imperitive, way. This means that generally Drush Fetcher commands are intended to be capable of being run more than once. Each call will verify that it is necessary before actually taking action. If a folder needs to be created, the existence of that folder is first tested and the path to that folder is created if necessary.

The fetcher suite was designed to be (relatively) easy to follow and to make as few assumptions as are reasonable. Where possible, command line options are available for swapping out the handling classes for different functionality. Fetcher uses PSR-0 compliant classes and leverages several Symfony 2 components to keey things nice and easy for us.

Dependency Injection

We use Pimple as a Dependency Injection Container. On the face of it that might seem like overkill for a simple project like this but it serves several purposes:

  • Centralizes the construction of context
  • Provides a central clearinghouse for all contextual information that must be accessed and stay synchronized across several objects
  • Provides a point of extension so that the desired classes or even the factory methods can be swapped out for other factory method at runtime.
  • Allows utility functions to be swapped out at runtime without a sophisticated plugin system

Site

This class has methods for all common top level operations though the details are delegated to child objects. This is the external most interface and acts as a gateway to the internal services for performing most common operations (though the internal services are considered public APIs as well).

System

The system provides information and functionality specific to the operating system environment in use.

Database

A Service class for administering a specific database.

VCS

A handler class for the version control system.

Server

A representation of the web server that will serve Drupal pages. Server may be a bad idea as it is different on different systems. Perhaps this should be collapsed into System.