Part of a team that is responsible for maintaining and updating several complex Drupal sites.
The constraint is, given Macs with no admin access, can you even start to do all the things you do need do to for Drupal 7 or 8 development, theming, testing and deployment?
Even running a localhost webserver seems challenging as most (MAMP, built-in Apache, etc) seem to require a sudo / admin privs to run. But there’s a thousand other things which seem to require the developer being a full-fledged citizen on your local machine. What other obstacles might one run into with no admin rights, yet doing serious Drupal development and using drush, sql sync tools, Git to Github, automated testing with Behat, devop scripts for pushing to remote production environment, etc?
Thanks for any input you might have on this.
Comments
Vagrant and VirtualBox are your friends
Many of the things you mention can be done within a virtual machine. Vagrant and VirtualBox don't require administrative rights to be run (although their initial installation does require admin access). Once you have a VM, you can have administrative rights within it to do drush, git, etc. If the file sharing is set up properly on the VM, you can even use your local IDE, etc. to edit files.
I spent more than a decade working though virtual machines on my government workstation in this manner. It's eminently do-able. A little kludgy at times, but do-able.
Thanks--I've been meaning to
Thanks--I've been meaning to read up on Vagrant as more and more Drupal articles mention it. Is VMware an equally robust virtual platform for this purpose?
Vagrant is a way to manage
Vagrant is a way to manage virtual machines. It has a VMWare plugin, but to be honest, you won't really care whether it is VMware or Virtualbox.