Drupal Code Provenance

Drupal Code Provenance

Overview

In a Drupal project the code that runs on the server splits into two very different piles. Drupal core and every contrib module, theme, and profile are community code: reviewed, released, and maintained by thousands of people. The code under modules/custom, themes/custom, and profiles/custom is what you and the agent wrote for this one site, and it has had none of that scrutiny. Server-side PHP is where the real risk lives (access checks, queries, form handlers), so custom PHP is the "dangerous" code worth measuring on its own.

This skill runs a script that counts SLOC (source lines, skipping blank and comment-only lines) and answers one question: how much of the running code did the agent write, versus the community. It reports server-side PHP and frontend separately, because a large custom frontend is far less dangerous than a large custom backend.

What counts as what

.theme files are PHP (theme preprocess and hook logic run on the server), so they count as server-side, not frontend. Contrib placed directly under modules/ (not in a contrib/ subfolder) still counts as community: anything under modules/ that is not in custom/ is community.

Workflow

1. Run the script from the skill folder against the project root. The docroot (web/, docroot/, or the root itself) is detected automatically by looking for core/.

   ./count-code.sh /path/to/drupal-project
   

   With no argument it uses the current directory. No external tools are required (bash, find, awk).

2. Read the two headline numbers. "Dangerous code you wrote" is the custom share of all server-side PHP SLOC. "Frontend code you wrote" is the custom share of all frontend SLOC. The table above them shows the raw custom-vs-community SLOC for each language bucket.

3. Report the result plainly. Give the percentages and the raw SLOC. Do not editorialize about whether a number is good or bad unless the user asks; a high custom-PHP share is expected on a heavily bespoke site and low on a mostly-assembled one.

Output

The script prints a table of custom-vs-community SLOC per language, then the two headline ratios:

Dangerous code you wrote (server-side PHP):
  10 SLOC of 20 total  =  50.0%
Frontend code you wrote:
  5 SLOC of 7 total  =  71.4%

Counting method

SLOC skips blank lines and comment-only lines (sloc.awk). Comment syntax is applied per language: // and /* */ for PHP and JS, /* */ only for CSS, {# #} for Twig. # is deliberately not treated as a PHP line comment, so PHP 8 attributes (#[Route(...)], plugin attributes) count as code and CSS id selectors (#header) are never mistaken for comments. The counter is a heuristic, not a parser: a comment token inside a string can truncate that line, but since such a line already counts as code the effect on the total is negligible.

Common Mistakes