Yo Hedley!

Bingo! I think we’re on to something here. It’s called yo hedley - and it’s one command that brings a true headless Drupal to everybody.

In my last DrupalCon BoF presentation “Gizra - we’ve got your headless covered” I’ve taken the time to explain why “headless” was in fact mostly a buzzword. While I encourage you to have a look at the presentation, I’m actually more excited about telling you why I feel this is no longer the case.

Go ahead and check the live demo!

My argument so far was that as a community we were lacking best practices for building a fully decoupled website. Saying Drupal can do headless based on project profiles companies have built isn’t very fair for the average developer. They probably have no clue where to start - that’s in contrast to saying, for example, that doing complex queries and displays is possible in Drupal, since Views can be used by anyone, and there are best practices around how to use Views.

Hedley is an opinionated approach to building decoupled webapps. It’s based on several projects we have already built, taking the best from each. You simply type yo hedley and it installs your installation profile, configures AngularJS, copies Behat and installs Composer, Bower and NPM. Wooh!

In fact all that is left to do is to cd client and grunt serve and login with demo / 1234.

In this post I could have gone over all the different components and best practices that are bundled in Hedley, such as how to write a RESTful resource that references another one, how to use AngularJS UI-Router, how to write migrate handlers or how to write Behat tests that use PhantomJS.

I could have even expanded on the idea of the generator itself, and how it allows us to encapsulate the entire knowledge we have gained so far, and keep updating it.

However, I won’t. Instead, I’d like encourage all the geeks out there to give it a spin, poke the code, find things you think should improve and contribute them back.

It’s almost 2015, and we can do amazing things together!