Talking Drupal #521 - Tugboat

Sep 22, 2025

In this engaging chat, James Sansbury, CEO of Tugboat and a seasoned expert in digital platforms, dives into how Tugboat can revolutionize CI/CD processes. He explains its per-merge-preview feature, which enhances testing and QA efficiency. James compares Tugboat to other solutions, emphasizing its speed and support. He shares unique use cases, from demos to sandbox environments, and discusses the importance of standardizing workflows across different hosts. Plus, discover the whimsical origin of Tugboat's mascot!

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ANECDOTE

ShURLy Powers Marketing Redirects

Nic shared a client's long-term use of the ShURLy module to append marketing UTM parameters automatically on redirects.
The client still runs the site on Drupal 7 and plans a cautious upgrade to Drupal 10/11.

ANECDOTE

Public Shortener Turned Into Abuse Nightmare

James described running a public shortener that became overrun with malicious links and required Google Safe Browsing checks.
They eventually exported valid redirects to an .htaccess file and shut down the public service.

INSIGHT

Preview Environments Prevent Release Bottlenecks

Tugboat provides unlimited, isolated preview environments for every pull request so teams can test changes before merging.
This reduces the end-of-sprint bottleneck of testing on a single staging server and lowers rollback risk.

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Today we are talking about Tugboat, What it does, and how it can super charge your ci/cd process with guest James Sansbury. We'll also cover ShURLy as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/521

Topics

Celebrating 20 Years with Drupal
Introduction to Tugboat
Comparing Tugboat with Other Solutions
Tugboat's Unique Advantages
Standardizing Workflows with Tugboat
Handling Hosting and Development Delays
Troubleshooting and Knowledge Transfer
Client Base and Use Cases
Agency Partnerships and Payment Structures
Unique and Interesting Use Cases
Challenges and Limitations of Tugboat
Setting Up and Onboarding with Tugboat
The Tugboat Origin Story
Compliance and Security Considerations

Resources

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi James Sansbury - tugboatqa.com q0rban

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to use Drupal as a URL shortening service? There's a module for that.
Module name/project name:
- ShURLy
Brief history
- How old: created in Aug 2010 by Jeff Robbins (jjeff) though recent releases are by João Ventura (jcnventura) of Portugal
- Versions available: 8.x-1.0-beta4 which supports Drupal 9.3, 10, and 11
Maintainership
- Minimally maintained, maintenance fixes only. Also, the project page says that the 8.x branch is not ready for production use. So a big caveat emptor if you decide to try it
- Number of open issues: 18 open issues, 5 of which are bugs against the current branch
Usage stats:
- 730 sites
Module features and usage
- With the ShURLly module installed, you can specify a long URL you want shortened, optionally also providing a case-sensitive short URL you want to use. If none is provided a short URL will be automatically generated
- The module provides usage data for the short URLs, and and a user you can see a list the ones you've created as well as their click data
- I was a little surprised to see that created short URLs are stored in a custom db table instead of as entities, but the module is able to avoid a full bootstrap of Drupal before issuing the intended redirects
- The module provides blocks for creating short URLs, a bookmarklet to save a short URL, and URL history. There is also Views integration for listing the short URLs, by user or in whatever way will be useful in your site
- There is also a submodule to provide web services for generating short URLs, or potentially expand a short URL back into its long form. The services support output as text, JSON, JSONP, XML, or PHP serialized array
- The module allows provides a variety of permissions to allow fine-grained access to the capabilities it provides, and also has features like per-role rate limiting, APIs to alter redirection logic, and support for the Google Safe Browsing API, and Google Analytics
- It's worth mentioned that ShURLy is intended to run in a site on its own instead of within a Drupal site that is also serving content directly, but it will attempt to avoid collisions with existing site paths
- Today's guest, James, is one of the maintainers of ShURLy, but Nic, you mentioned before the show that you have a customer using this module. What can you tell us about the customer's use case and your experience working with ShURLy?