2020 is a special year for everyone, lots of people say because it is a leap year and usually weird things and cataclysms especially happen in leap periods of time. Starting with COVID epidemic and continuing with racism problems and protests, what’s next? There is always something worse that could happen…

Talking about pandemic in particular it is a big reset. A big reset for human kind in terms of finance, social, mindset and values. Nobody could even imagine that in just a couple of months the world could be ruined and turned upside down.

Personally, 2020 started with big plans by planning to visit family, organize few vacation trips and enjoy more the summer time and long lasting days that we were all waiting for after the winter. But unexpected happened, Europe got covered with COVID wave and everything got paralyzed.

I would say the first few weeks did not feel so bad, working from home, cooking few meals per day — it was even fun. I think for some persons who were not even working remotely — they felt like being on a small vacation that should rapidly last and the next day they will jump into their cars and will continue driving to their working places to continue the daily routine.

Unfortunately not, everything was starting to become more difficult and difficult to handle epidemic wise and infections were constantly growing with every day — meaning we’re stuck home for a long time.

It is a crash — a mental crash. Nobody is mentally ready to spend months at home, we were not taught or trained for such type of mission, I believe only astronauts are ready to handle such complexity tasks of self-isolation in the space. Laugh comes first — tears or sadness comes second.

It took a while to regroup myself in order to align an interesting journey for the upcoming months at home. As an output I learned to be more disciplined and be a better friend with myself.

The discipline of mind and body.
My whole day depends on how the morning starts and it should always start fresh and newborn with a clean mind. Avoiding commuting and winning an extra hour helped to get more rest, find some time for meditation while sipping a fresh brewed coffee — this is a key for a perfect start of the day.

I noticed that I’m able to work non stop 100% concentration in a fully automatic mode from 9 till 3PM like a brand new Ford Mustang, super productive and cover most of the things for the day, even more then needed. 3PM — 4PM was mainly used for some jogging outside or pull-ups on a special terrain which I found outside in the neighborhood. This is a perfect time to give your body and mind a shake and not feel like a stone sitting whole day in front of the computer. It took a while to get used to outdoor trainings since GYM feels always a different experience motivation wise… all what you have to do is just start doing it.

Evening time (5–7PM)was spent more for the calls with US based clients where I was feeling again energized and fresh, like it was a morning again. You always get this feeling after exercising when your brain is full of oxygen and the blood flow is high. Remember, you may feel super lazy especially working from home — even making few steps from bed to kitchen may feel like climbing a hill and here you should break your barrier and learn self-discipline.

You should kick yourself in the ass and start doing things otherwise you gonna easily transform into a vegetable, your muscles and body will get weak and you would not be even able to raise a spoon to eat (joking of course). Is all about the mindset, the mindset which can make you be different from others and achieve more productivity and results wise.

Another cool thing which I found just to help you get this kick, is to buy a yoga mat - lay it on the floor every morning or noon and start some youtube indoor training videos (abs core training, functional training — start searching it). This will fastly motivate you to start the training and continue with it. A combination of running outside, listening great music and doing these youtube based training — made me feel alive again.

Evenings were chill, mainly we were not limited in going outside and I spent this time to discover more new places in the city I live by walking around. Surprisingly, I realized that I was able to see things that I never saw during my last 3 years living in the same place.

Find time to enhance yourself, besides work and keeping physical condition up find time to learn something new. Let’s say you get few free hours or you are on track with your weekly tasks, find 1–2 hours to start learning something new. Since I’m in IT — I was able to make a good progress while learning a new programming language in only 2 weeks. Find 30–60 minutes to practice Spanish or watch some movies before going to sleep also in Spanish which took me to another level.

While being self-isolated, not seeing people is very important to trick your brain and not let the thoughts take over you, because they will gonna take you nowhere. When you have no things to do, the brain will always take over and will start giving you 101 reasons to think about bad things and less about good ones. At some point you may get the feeling you wanna climb the walls and get out the cage, but is not so easy at this time — there is nowhere to run… streets are empty, restaurants and bars are closed… you can run .. but not run from yourself. This is a perfect time to learn and be friend with yourself and pass over this breakthrough period of time.

Pandemic is an investment.
Yes you lost your job, you have no social life anymore and you have to cook everyday — what can be worse? But don’t get upset, this is the perfect time to start doing things you always wanted to do. Imagine that you gained freedom, the freedom you were always dreaming about — from being locked in a 24/7 working schedule. Think about what brings you joy and satisfaction, what makes you happy, what would you love to give a try, look for some materials or youtube videos, trainings, coursera… and start learning with baby steps. Keep away from being lazy / disorganized or procrastinating things. Days will transform in weeks, weeks in months the time will pass and you will excel if you stick to a schedule and self-discipline — you will gain knowledge, loose weight / gain muscles and pandemic will pass.

Pandemic is about appreciation.
And now, when things started to re-open you start to feel the joy. The joy of taking a coffee on the terrace — feels such a small things but brings so much happiness at the moment, even seeing people on the streets. Recruiters getting more active and reaching out to you, new job openings appearing daily. The life continues … the time has passed, but did it pass reasonable?

Only you can decide.

Drupal & Solr — is a perfect solution for building scalable sites with powerful and customizeable search indexes which can return data per your custom or predefined query really fast.

Storing thousands or hundreds of thousands of records is pretty easy and fast to get what you need per your criteria. You can also define your custom indexes and what data you want to store in index.

Prerequisites:
+ Drupal 8
+ Search API
+ Facets API
+ Acquia Search

Let’s assume we have multiple LLC environments in my particular case I will take Acquia: Dev, Stage, Prod. Having the Search API and Acquia Search modules installed, makes everything work mainly out of the box.

Problem
We struggled and spent a considerable amount of time, defining 2 or even 3 Search API Solr Server configuration sets which was definetively not a scalable approach and very, very hard to maintain when you talk about same settings across all of the environments.

In other words, having dev and local environments we ended up maintaining 2 separate configurations:

• Acquia Search API Solr (for Acquia LLC environments)
• Solr (for local development)

The thing we were doing is toggling what server and index are active based on your current ENV variable.

Let’s say if I’m on my local than enable Solr, Local Solr — otherwise if on Acquia ENV than enable Acquia Search API Solr and Acquia Search Solr Index.

Well it made it work but at the final end we made it much more robust using the config overrides.

Config Overrides

The cool part in Drupal that config overrides allows you to override the stored-in database configurations for specific entities. For example we had the Search API configuration entity for particular setting and we can easily override it.

Step 1: View active config.

In order to view the active search api server configuration you need to run the following drush command:

drush cget search_api.server.acquia_search_server --include-overridden

Right after running this drush command, you will get the actual configuration for this property including the code overrides, which is pretty cool to track down the final config, even it was overriden.

As presented in screenshot bellow, you will get the active config, now it is pretty easy to override it with your custom one.

Step2: Overriding the configuration.

Go to your settings.php file, it does not matter if you do directly in it or maybe you include the other splitted configuration settings files, make sure you do this in a file which has access to Drupal global $config variable.

if($env == 'local'){
 $config['search_api.server.acquia_search_server'] = [
   'backend_config' => [
     'connector' => 'standard',
     'connector_config' => [
       'host' => 'solr',
       'path' => '/solr',
       'core' => 'drupal',
       'port' => '8983'
     ]
   ] 
 ];
}

...
//Add the other overrides for the rest of environments based on $env variable value.

Remember to replace acquia_search_server with your server machine name, this is what will make to override the properties of specific server config based on the $env variable, which identifies on what server or instance you run this code.

Step3: Re-check modified configuration.

In order to re-check that configuration that your override applied, run the same command from Step 1 one more time, and you should be able to see the new values.

The most frustrated part for me was related to Search API Server edit page, where I was keeping to see the old values. Not sure if this is the case in your situation but at the moment while writing this article running drush command to get the current configuration is the safest approach to ensure that is properly configured and overriden.

Acquia specifics

If you use Acquia Search (meaning their service), make sure you followup with support to retrieve your core and colony id related information. You can find more related information how to configure it here.

Conclusions

Configuration overrides allows a really flexible and generic way to override the configurations through code. But be careful whatever you see is not all the time what is actually configured under the hood.