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DAST is a set of build projects, tasks and other extensions created on the Phing framework for automating a wide variety of Drupal deployment and staging scenarios. The goal of DAST is to provide a formal, repeatable, reusable process for 'building' a Drupal site using a formal build tool and build language. DAST applies the concept of the software build to creating Drupal sites...Phing build files are syntactically identical to Ant build files and provide tasks for downloading Drupal core and modules from CVS, copying and deleting files and directories, creating the Drupal database and user, writing to configuration files, and generally any of the manual steps that users / developers / testers / admins repeatedly perform to bootstrap a new Drupal site.

For developers and testers if you're tired of the download/untar/drop/create database routine and you want to automate testing patches and modules then you're in the right place. If you're looking for a tool for Drupal build management and to do stuff like automated unit testing and code coverage reports, and anything that can be done to make Drupal's developers lives easier and improve code quality, you're also in the right place.

DAST build files complement installation profiles. Installation profiles are designed to run in a working Drupal site after it has been deployed. DAST's purpose is to deploy the Drupal site. So once the site has been bootstrapped, everything related to configuration and customization can then be handled by installation profiles - that's their purpose. DAST build files handle the setup steps of grabbing the core source and modules, and configuring the database and web server before the site can function. So, let's say you created a distro called Milkdrop you wanted to distribute - you could bundle a DAST build script with your distro which the user could run to download or check for updates of core and modules required by Milkdrop and then setup the server - which would make the whole process of creating the Drupal site much more user-friendly and less error-prone. After the site is built the install profile will run to continue the installation inside Drupal.

DAST is a PHP CLI application for *nix/Window - it does not run inside Drupal and requires shell access and a PHP 5.2.x or above CLI interpreter. DAST depends on several PHP libraries which can be obtained from http://www.abeharry.info/stuff/dast-deps.tar.gz or http://www.abeharry.info/stuff/dast-deps.zip. See the README.txt for full install and usage instructions.

The DAST project was created as part of Drupal's participation in Google's Summer of Code 2007. The mentor is Rok Žlender. The code release submitted at the end of SoC07 is available here: http://drupal.org/node/169146 (DAST-5.x-2.0-soc07final)

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