ReactPHP for Drupal deployments and workers

I recently held a live stream where I walked through the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of a Drupal project to DigitalOcean’s App Platform and other CI/CD items. App Platform has its quirks, but it’s simple to build an application with various components. My project, Whiskey Dex, builds a Docker image that pushes to my container registry and then updates my App Platform manifest to use the new image tag, triggering a deployment.

One thing it, and other similar platforms, lacks is the ability to perform operations once a deployment is finished. After a deployment, that is when you need to run schema migrations and other automated updates. It also is missing the ability to add a Cron component to run particular tasks on a schedule. Does provide Worker components, however. A worker is a service that isn’t exposed over HTTP and will restart if its script exits or errors.

Previously I wrote about using ReactPHP to run Drush tasks at controlled intervals in a worker script. This approach was used to execute various tasks at different intervals when cron granularity was at a minimum of 5 minutes and also needed extra failure handling and reporting. What I didn’t think about until recently was using the boot of my worker to handle deployment tasks.

My solution for Whiskey Dex deployments on App Platform to perform post-deployment actions and cron was to leverage a Worker component that executes a ReactPHP script. The main application serves Drupal over HTTP. The worker would run…