Drupal & Backdrop Blog

Part of my job as a developer is making website hosting recommendations to my clients. To create a list of recommendations, I determine the appropriate plan for the website (or websites) we're working with, and present the options to my client. In order for them to make a decision based on these recommendations, each option needs to include an associated cost.

Since most of my clients are small businesses (with less than 5 employees, in many cases only 1), educational institutions, non-profits, or otherwise operating on a tight budget, they need to know what the cost will be head of time, and they need the ability to reject the recommendation if it is too expensive.

This guide is intended to help people using Cloudflare to speed up and protect their Backdrop CMS sites.

Step #1

Create three Cloudflare PageRules to exclude the Backdrop cron page and the link to run cron as an admin from Cloudflare’s caching and performance features:

• www.example.com/node/*/edit - Cache Level: Bypass
• www.example.com/node/add/* - Cache Level: Bypass
• www.example.com/core/cron.php* - Cache Level: Bypass

Step #2

If you have a valid SSL certificate on your server, you'll need to navigate to the Cloudflare Crypto section and update the SSL setting to `Full (strict)`. Without this setting SSL will be terminated at the Cloudflare edge server, and all traffic on your server will come in through port 80 instead of 443.

Working with Git is great, but before you see the real benefits of using Git you'll need to have your project hooked up to a remote repository.

Most people enter the world of Git when they are brought on to a project with multiple developers. In this case, there is likely already an existing repo, and all you need to learn to do is pull the latest changes, and push your own.

Navigating to your code in the terminal

First, you'll need to get a local site up and running. You can do so using MAMP, Kalabox, or any other tool that makes that easier, but make sure you can find out where the files are saved on disk. You'll need to get there from the command line to follow along with the rest of this post.

Open your terminal, and navigate to this location. I do this using the cd command. cd stands for "change directory".

I've written about how to manage your configuration directory in version control (Git) several times, but now that I've done it in the wild on a few different sites, I thought I'd write it up here as well.

Note: this figure-8 approach works best when there is only a single developer on the project. If there is more than one, this approach can get confusing, and I prefer the versioned staging directory approach.

Below I have outlined how I set up most of my sites, with the Git root a directory above the webroot. This allows me to keep things that should not be web-accessible (like config!) in version control.