How to deploy a module locally for testing?

Question

I'm currently developing my first custom module for Drupal 7 and am having a hard time finding documentation about the available local deployment strategies.

I have a custom module project, consisting of my modules sources, a gulp file and some other things of less interest (README, .editorconfig, ...). When I make a change on my source code, my gulp builder automatically deploy the changes to my local Drupal installation (the document root), in the folder where my custom module is installed.

Now, I would like to test my changes, and that's where I'm stuck: changes that are part of the install hooks of the module (adding fields, custom nodes, and so on) don't appear on the website. I have to disable my module, uninstall it, resinstall it and enable it to see those changes. This is a very long and painful process.

Even using drush commands to achieve this, the disable, uninstall, install and enable process is very long, meaning I'm losing a lot of time waiting for Drupal to manage my module, even for the tiniest source code change.

And of course, in any case, I have to recreate every content I had previsouly created to test my module.

Is there a strategy to allow near-realtime deploy and testing when developing a custom module ? How are you guys dealing with this ? Is there at least a drush command to replay the install hooks of my module ?

Thanks by advance.

Answer 1

I do not think there will be a way to reduce time of reverting the database changes. However you can get a shortcut command to re-install a module.

Checkout answer by @MPD Quick Uninstall/Reinstall of a Custom Module, so you will need devel module to bind all those commands in one, also devel is good for development purpose.

Answer 2

In many cases you can develop and test your code outside the install/uninstall hooks, and when you know it's working you simply add it to the hooks and run it once or twice.

You can also use Backup & Migrate and do a quick db restore.