Drupal Tutorial Video

Drupal Tutorial Video

Overview

Records a narrated 1920x1080 MP4 that shows how to set up a Drupal module. The skill reads the module to learn the real setup, writes a storyboard for approval, then records each step as a beat (one narration sentence + its action) with a visible cursor and character-by-character typing, generates ElevenLabs narration per beat, length-fits each beat so the words stay in sync with the picture, overlays a caption bar, and concatenates the beats into one video.

The recording happens inside the ddev web container on a virtual X display (:99) at 1920x1080. Two tools split the work:

• agent-browser (the brain): navigate, read the accessibility tree, locate an element, return its on-screen box, wait for page state. Its CDP input is synthetic and invisible, so it never does the visible clicking.
• xdotool (the hands): move the real X11 pointer to that box in small steps for smooth motion, click, and type with a per-key delay. Because the pointer on :99 is real, ffmpeg -f x11grab captures it natively. What moves is exactly what clicks.

Terminal commands that cannot be shown in the browser (composer require, drush en, ddev ...) are rendered as still command cards, never as a recorded terminal.

Requirements (hard)

• A running ddev project. You need its site URL, an admin username, and a password.
• agent-browser in the web container (preflight installs it there with npm; it drives Chromium over CDP on the container's localhost). See https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser.
• awaz (npm i -g awaz, https://github.com/ahmadawais/awaz), an ElevenLabs TTS wrapper. Needs ELEVENLABS_API_KEY in the environment (NOT @elevenlabs/cli, which has no TTS). The key must have the Text to Speech and Voices (read) permissions. TTS lives behind the speak subcommand: awaz speak --voice-id <id> --no-play -o out.mp3 "text". The top-level -v is --version (it prints the version, exits 0, and writes no file, a silent failure that only surfaces at finish-beat.sh), and --no-play is required headless or awaz tries to open a speaker device and fails. Store the key somewhere like ~/.config/elevenlabs/key and export it before recording; nothing sets it for you.
• ffmpeg, Xvfb, xdotool, chromium in the web container (preflight installs these).
• Montserrat TTF for the caption bar (preflight downloads it if missing).

Run preflight.sh first; it checks and sets up all of the above.

Contrib modules installed from a git source can block every composer require. If a contrib module sits on a local branch with unpushed commits, composer refuses any require (not just ones touching that package) because it wants to restore the locked ref: Source directory .../contrib/<name> has unpushed changes on the current branch. Non-destructive workaround, after confirming the commit is genuinely local-only (git -C <dir> branch -r --contains <sha> returns nothing) and taking a safety bundle:

git -C web/modules/contrib/<name> bundle create /backup/<name>.bundle --all
git -C web/modules/contrib/<name> checkout <locked ref from composer.lock>

The branch still exists on disk and can be checked out again afterwards.

Helper scripts

Run every script from the ddev project root, with export TUT_SLUG=<tutorial-slug> set (a short kebab-case name for this tutorial, e.g. commerce-checkout). Scripts read lib.sh for shared paths and settings.

Container helpers (hands.sh, audit.sh, fade-audio.sh, deadair.sh) are copied into the build dir by preflight and run inside the container, e.g. ddev exec bash /var/www/html/.tutorial-build/<slug>/audit.sh (this container path is $CDIR in lib.sh, used as shorthand below). They loop over 90+ files in a single script file on purpose: an inline ddev exec bash -lc "for ...; do" loop breaks, because the host shell expands $var before the container ever sees it (see "Getting commands past ddev exec").

Build directory

Everything lives under the ddev mount so host and container share one filesystem:

<project>/.tutorial-build/<slug>/
  storyboard.md
  scene-final.txt          # optional: beat numbers that end a scene (finish-all.sh reads it)
  hands.sh                 # container helpers, copied here by preflight so the container can run them
  audit.sh  fade-audio.sh  deadair.sh
  assets/Montserrat-*.ttf
  slides/NN.html           # local concept/intro slides (served to the kiosk browser)
  beats/NN.mp4             # raw silent capture for beat NN (or command card)
  beats/NN.orig.mp4        # untouched capture kept by trim.sh
  beats/NN.pretrim.mp4     # untouched capture kept by deadair.sh
  audio/NN.mp3             # narration for beat NN, from awaz (faded)
  audio/NN.orig.mp3        # untouched narration kept by fade-audio.sh
  final/NN.caption.txt     # caption bar text for beat NN (one line)
  final/beat-NN.mp4        # padded + muxed + captioned
  final/tutorial.mp4       # concatenated result

Nothing is deleted at the end. The user may ask for changes. The .orig/.pretrim copies mean any trim or fade can be redone without re-recording.

Scenes and beats

A beat is the atomic unit: one narration sentence and the single action it describes, recorded as its own clip. A scene is just a storyboard grouping of consecutive beats (a heading like "Configure the provider"); it has no separate file.

Beats are the reason narration stays in sync with the picture. Each beat's video and its narration are the same clip, so the words cannot drift from the action: finish-beat.sh length-fits each beat to max(action, speech), and the beats concatenate in order. Do not record a whole scene as one take with one long narration; that is what makes audio and video drift.

Beats are numbered globally, 01, 02, 03, ... in play order. The scene grouping lives only in storyboard.md for human organization.

The beat number is the edit timeline; leave gaps. concat.sh orders by a plain filename sort of final/beat-*.mp4, so the number is the play order. Two consequences:

• There is no room to insert. Adding a beat between 89 and 90 means renumbering, and a beat-89b scheme is unsafe (plain sort is locale-collated and may ignore punctuation). Reordering requests arrive after everything is recorded, so number in steps of 10 (010, 020, 030, ...) from the start; insertion then costs nothing. When a late edit needs a new beat mid-sequence and you did not leave gaps, the cheap move is to swap two adjacent beats whose content can trade places (two slides, say).
• Removing beats is free. Gaps concatenate fine; cut a beat's file and nothing else changes.

Derive the scene-final list, never hardcode it. finish-all.sh gives the last beat of each scene a longer tail. Feed it the list from scene-final.txt (or a beats.json with scene_final: true), produced from the storyboard, so reordering cannot silently leave the pause on the wrong beat.

Beat taxonomy

Intro caveat: the kiosk Chromium is served HTTP 406 by drupal.org (looks like TLS or client-hint fingerprinting: curl from the same container with Chrome-like headers gets 200, the browser with a normal Chrome/* UA does not, and UA / Accept* / --lang flags do not fix it). So the intro and module-page types that open drupal.org/project/<machine_name> may not be recordable here. If agent-browser open fails with ERR_HTTP_RESPONSE_CODE_FAILURE, fall back to a locally rendered slide (record-slide.sh) that lists the project and why it matters, keep the project URL in the caption, and tell the user why.

Slides are cheap: machine-generated HTML slides beat screenshots for concept beats (regenerating all 34 after a "3 lanes -> 5 lanes" content change was one script run). Text-to-image is fine for backdrops (a hero image at opacity:.42 behind real HTML type) but useless for text - render the type as HTML, and leave the bottom ~15% empty for the caption bar.

Getting commands past ddev exec

Almost every hard bug in this skill traces to one fact: ddev exec (and the cexec helper) re-parse their arguments through an extra shell before the container sees them. Anything with quotes, braces, backslashes, $(...), $var, or commas is mangled, and it almost always fails silently rather than erroring. Real failures from one run:

• A wait loop with $(seq ...) inside cexec killed the container shell before its pkill ran, so captures never stopped and later beats came out as 48-byte stubs.
• Typing the regex /[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,}/i produced ...+.[a-z]2/i on screen: brace expansion ate {2,} and \. lost its backslash. The beat looked fine but the pattern could not match an email, so the guardrail being demonstrated would not have worked.
• agent-browser eval "location.hash='pre'" lost the quotes, evaluated location.hash=pre (named-element access to <div id="pre">), and silently set the hash to garbage. Three beats recorded the wrong state; the only tell was byte-identical .mp4 files.

Rules:

• Keep each container command to a single simple statement. Do all control flow (loops, waits, retries) on the host, one plain cexec per iteration.
• Type through hands.sh type64: base64 on the host (printf %s 'text' | base64 -w0), decode past the boundary in the container. Never use the plain type path for anything but bare ASCII words.
• For agent-browser eval, wrap the whole call in bash -lc with escaped double quotes and use single quotes only inside the JS expression, or avoid eval and navigate with a hash URL.
• Loops break even inside bash -lc. ddev exec bash -lc "for t in 1 2 3; do ffmpeg -ss $t ...; done" fails with t: unbound variable because the host shell expands $t to empty first. Either loop on the host (one ddev exec per iteration) or put the loop in a script file and run ddev exec bash /var/www/html/.../script.sh (much faster for 90+ iterations; this is why the container helpers are files, not inline loops).
• drush ev with non-trivial quoting silently produces nothing. A one-liner iterating plugin definitions returned empty output at exit 0; the same code as a file via drush php:script foo.php worked. Prefer php:script for anything beyond a bare expression.

Workflow

Create a todo per step.

1. Preflight. export TUT_SLUG=<slug> then ./skills/.../preflight.sh. Confirm the ddev URL, username, and password with the user.

2. Ask the intro question. Ask whether the video should open with a why-this-matters / marketing intro over the module's drupal.org page, or go straight to the steps.

3. Read the module first, and map the whole followable path. Read <machine_name>.info.yml, README, config forms, permissions, routing, and services to derive the actual setup steps from the code, not from assumptions. Same "read first" discipline as drupal-module-documentation. Two things a "technically correct" tutorial still gets wrong:

   • Module-set completeness. A tutorial you cannot follow is a defect. List every route the later scenes depend on and check each resolves with the set you install. Admin UIs often live in a separate submodule (ECA needs eca_ui for /admin/config/workflow/eca; installing eca + eca_content + eca_tool alone leaves the viewer with no way in). One module filter can sometimes cover a whole set when the descriptions cross-reference each other.
   • Confirm a "missing" feature from a second angle before acting on it. A throwaway probe once reported zero action plugins and nearly got a working module written off; they existed the whole time. In plugin-land, getDefinition('<known-bad-id>') is a cheap oracle: its exception enumerates every valid id.

4. Write the storyboard. Write .tutorial-build/<slug>/storyboard.md as scenes (headings) broken into beats. Each beat is one narration sentence and the single action it describes, and carries: the global beat number, type, the on-screen action(s), the narration sentence, and the one-line caption. For any beat that navigates to or acts on a route, put the admin path or link in that caption (see Caption bar). Keep beats to one sentence + one action so the narration cannot drift. Get the user's approval before recording.

5. Pick a voice. Run awaz voices, present the options with their names and ids, and ask the user which voice to use. Remember the chosen voice id for --voice-id.

6. Start the session. ./session.sh start "<site-url>". This opens the kiosk browser on :99 inside the container.

7. Record beat by beat. For each beat, in order:

   • Write the caption to final/NN.caption.txt (one line, plain).
   • browser-action:
     1. ./record-beat.sh start NN
     2. Drive the browser with ui.sh, which resolves the element, scrolls it into the safe viewport band, and moves + clicks with the visible cursor (all the ddev exec quoting lives in one place; see "Finding and clicking elements"):

        ./ui.sh open  "<url>"
        ./ui.sh click name "modules[<machine_name>][enable]"   # find -> scroll into view -> move + click
        ./ui.sh type  "a value to type"                        # metacharacter-safe (type64)
        ./ui.sh click nth  "op:1"                              # the 2nd name="op" button, e.g. Save
        

        Pick the matcher for the target: name for form fields, nth for same-named submit buttons, link/any for admin links and React rows. Each beat is one action, so keep it short. Before typing into a field that may already hold text (search/filter fields keep their value across reloads), clear it first (./ui.sh key ctrl+a then type). Pace it like a human. Leave the result on screen for a moment before stopping.
     3. ./record-beat.sh stop NN
   • slide (concept / intro / outro): TUT_SLIDES_URL=<base> ./record-slide.sh NN. Local HTML is the practical answer for concept beats and for anything that would open drupal.org (which 406s the kiosk browser). Keep the project URL in the caption. Leave the bottom ~15% of each slide empty for the caption bar.
   • command-card: ./make-card.sh NN 4 "composer require drupal/<name>".

   Beats that share one page load must be recorded as one continuous sequence. If beats 33-35 depend on checkbox state persisting across a client-side filter change, re-recording one in isolation loses that state.

8. Generate narration. For each beat, generate its one-sentence voice-over with the speak subcommand (the top-level -v is --version and writes no file; --no-play is required headless):

   awaz speak --voice-id <voice-id> --no-play -o .tutorial-build/<slug>/audio/NN.mp3 "<beat narration sentence>"
   

   Optional flags: --speed 0.5-2.0, --stability 0-1, --style 0-1, --model-id <id>.

9. Post-production on the raw material (before finishing). Two passes must run before finish-beat.sh muxes and pads (see "Post-production: dead air and audio"):

   • Fade narration tails: ddev exec bash $CDIR/fade-audio.sh. ElevenLabs ends each line mid-sound, so unfaded audio clips audibly against the padded silence.
   • Trim trailing dead air: ddev exec bash $CDIR/audit.sh to see which beats run long, then ddev exec bash $CDIR/deadair.sh dry and ... apply (it verifies each cut and reverts bad ones). Use ./trim.sh NN head|tail <secs> for beats deadair leaves alone (a blinking cursor never reads as frozen).

10. Finish the beats. ./finish-all.sh runs finish-beat.sh over every beat and gives scene-final beats a longer tail (from scene-final.txt). Per beat it length-fits to max(action, speech), adds lead/tail silence, freeze-pads the video so it never ends before the narration, muxes the audio, and draws the caption bar. (One beat: ./finish-beat.sh NN, or TUT_TAIL=1.5 ./finish-beat.sh NN for a scene-final pause.)

11. Verify the whole set, not just that files exist. Five separate failures in one run left beat files that existed at non-zero size but showed the wrong state. Run ./check-beat.sh NN on anything suspect (duration + a still frame + stub/overlong flags) and audit.sh for a one-pass pacing sweep. Identical file size to the previous beat usually means nothing changed on screen. And after any form-submit beat, read the state back instead of eyeballing the video: drush config:get <id> for config (prefer specific keys over scanning YAML), drush pml for module state, drush sqlq for content. This is the strongest check that the on-camera action landed.

12. Concatenate and present. ./concat.sh (the final encode of a long tutorial takes several minutes; it refuses to start if a prior encode is still running in the container), then show the user .tutorial-build/<slug>/final/tutorial.mp4. Do not clean up. Wait for change requests; re-record or re-finish only the affected beats and re-run concat.sh.

Caption bar

finish-beat.sh draws a full-width bar across the bottom ~9% of the frame: drawbox filled black@0.94, then centered white Montserrat text from final/NN.caption.txt with expansion=none. Keep captions to one short line. An empty caption file means no bar for that beat. Two things learned the hard way: at black@0.85 the page text showed through and fought the caption (hence 0.94), and without expansion=none drawtext parses %{...} and backslashes even from a textfile, so a caption containing a path, %, or a regex rendered as an empty black bar with no error.

Show the path or link in the caption. When a beat navigates somewhere or acts on a specific route, put the admin path (or URL) in the caption so a viewer can follow along without pausing. Use the route the user actually types or clicks, not the narration restated:

• Navigating to a config page: Configuration > System > Site information (/admin/config/system/site-information)
• Clicking a menu link or tab: Manage > Extend (/admin/modules)
• A command-card beat: show the command itself, e.g. composer require drupal/<name>.

Keep it to one line: if the breadcrumb plus path is too long, show just the path (/admin/config/system/site-information). Paths are literal, so they are exempt from the prose style rules (a real path may contain characters the style section otherwise avoids).

Narration writing style

The spoken narration and captions use the same voice as the other skills in this repo: plain, direct, terse, active voice. No em dashes or en dashes. No marketing hype or subjective qualifiers in the step narration (the opt-in intro may say why the module matters, but still in verifiable terms). No emojis.

Finding and clicking elements (ui.sh)

ui.sh is the browser-action driver. It resolves an element to a screen coordinate, scrolls it into the safe band, refuses hidden/zero-size boxes, then moves and clicks with the visible cursor. Everything below was a real failure that produced a valid-looking .mp4 of the wrong state.

Off-viewport clicks fail silently. A click below y≈1000 or above y≈80 lands outside the 1080 kiosk viewport. xdotool reports success, the beat records normally, and the form simply never submits (a Save button at y=1099, "below the fold"). ui.sh scrolls the target to mid-screen and re-measures before clicking. agent-browser has no negative scroll, so a target above the fold needs scroll up N.

Four matcher kinds, not one:

Plus sel (raw CSS) and text (substring over curated tags). Substring matching is dangerous on admin pages: text "Lock" matched "Blocks" in the sidebar and threw the cursor across the screen. Prefer link/any/exact for short words, or scope the search to a container.

Reject invisible and zero-size elements. #states-hidden fields (an Authorization-prefix that only appears once a key is chosen) return a box of 0,0; moving there parks the cursor in the top-left corner on camera. ui.sh refuses 0,0 and filters matchers on getBoundingClientRect().width > 0 so hidden duplicate controls do not win.

Field names worth remembering:

• Node form title: title[0][value] (not title)
• Module enable checkbox: modules[<machine_name>][enable]
• Module filter: text

Verify with check-beat.sh, not a post-hoc screenshot. An open <select> dropdown, a hover state, or a tooltip is gone by the time a screenshot runs; the recorded frame is the truth.

Shadow DOM, tokens, and React fields

• Shadow DOM is invisible to selectors but not to the screen. A Modeler component panel put its channel_id/text fields in a shadow root; document.querySelectorAll('input,textarea') returned 3 for the whole page while two more were plainly visible. xdotool needs only screen coordinates (from a screenshot), so click and type at raw coordinates, then verify by reading the saved config afterwards.
• Native <select> dropdowns DO record. They are invisible to the DOM, not to the screen - x11grab captures the open dropdown and every option fine. Drive them by type-ahead (click the select, type64 the option's visible label, press Return, which fires change so #ajax runs), and open the dropdown on camera when the options themselves are the point of the beat.
• Typing [ opens a token browser that eats the rest of the line: Node [node:nid]... leaves Node [ in the field and the remainder in an "INSERT A TOKEN" popup. Insert via the clipboard, which fires no per-keystroke handlers:

  agent-browser --cdp $CDP clipboard write "Node [node:nid] with [node:title] got updated."
  ./ui.sh key ctrl+v
  

• React controlled inputs ignore .value =. The ui.sh paste trick (.value + input event) works for Drupal core forms but not React; for a React field set through the native setter and dispatch, or the component state never updates.

Post-production: dead air and audio

Run these once after all beats are recorded and narrated, before finish-all.sh. Both fixed user-visible defects on the first cut.

Audit the whole set first. ddev exec bash $CDIR/audit.sh compares video/speech/final duration across every beat in one pass (a single run surfaced 27 pacing problems). It flags AUDIO-TIGHT (too little breath after narration) and DEAD-AIR (video running well past speech).

Fade every narration tail. ElevenLabs gives no trailing decay - the last 150ms of every file sits at -16..-29 dB, audibly clipped against the padded silence. ddev exec bash $CDIR/fade-audio.sh fades the last 120ms and appends real silence, always deriving from an untouched .orig so a re-run cannot double-fade. Do this before finish-beat.sh muxes the audio. Verify with volumedetect over the final 150ms: it should read about -91 dB.

Trim trailing dead air, then verify the trim. Beats routinely ran 5-19s past the last on-screen change because the capture slept waiting for a page. ddev exec bash $CDIR/deadair.sh apply cuts the frozen tail. Two tunings were hard-won:

• freezedetect=n=-75dB:d=0.7, not the -58dB default: at -58dB a checkbox tick counts as "frozen" and the trim silently cuts the click, ending the beat in the pre-click state. (A select='gt(scene,...)' approach was also tried and reported no changes at all - do not use it.)
• After each cut it compares the trimmed clip's last frame against the original's (psnr, revert if < ~38 dB). A beat ending in the wrong state is worse than a slow beat.

Blind spot: a blinking text cursor in a focused input never registers as frozen, so those beats need a manual head-trim and a human look at the end frame. Static slides shorter than ~6.5s are left alone (finish-beat.sh freeze-pads them back anyway).

Head vs tail when trimming manually (trim.sh): keep the tail when the payoff is the result (install confirmation, saved message, JSON response); keep the head when the action is the content (ticking boxes, typing, opening a picker). trim.sh keeps NN.orig.mp4 so any cut can be redone.

Recording gotchas

General lessons for recording a Drupal admin UI in a headless browser:

• Clear text inputs before typing. GET filter and search fields keep their value across reloads, so typing again appends ("Powered byPowered by") and the filter breaks. Clear first with hands.sh key ctrl+a then type, or use agent-browser fill.
• Pre-seed AJAX-dependent forms. Forms that rebuild dependent fields via Drupal AJAX (a provider select that repopulates a model select, etc.) are unreliable to drive live. Set the value first with drush config:set so the form loads already settled, then only demonstrate the final selection on camera.
• Avoid batch operations on camera. Actions that trigger a batch (some imports, adding a language with interface translation) rely on a meta-refresh that stalls in the headless browser. Disable or pre-run the batch with drush before recording so the page redirects instantly.
• Target fields by name, not id. Drupal #ajax rebuilds regenerate element ids, so a selector grabbed before the rebuild goes stale. Use getElementsByName('...')[0].
• Drive native <select> by type-ahead (click, type64 the visible label, Return). The dropdown is invisible to the DOM so clicking options directly fails, but it does record on screen - open it on camera when the options are the point. See "Shadow DOM, tokens, and React fields".
• Paste long text, don't type it. A ~1800-char field typed key-by-key is a >2-minute beat. Set .value via eval (base64 in, atob in the page), dispatch input+change, and narrate it as "paste in...".
• Never put control flow or $(...) in a container command. See "Getting commands past ddev exec": keep each cexec to one simple statement, and type through type64.

Known tuning points (verify on the first live run)

• CDP: use the container. Host CDP does not work: ddev maps the exposed port to a dynamic host port, and Chromium's DevTools rejects the forwarded connection because the Host-header port no longer matches its listening port (DNS-rebinding protection; --remote-allow-origins=* only covers Origin, not Host). Always drive agent-browser inside the container against localhost: ddev exec agent-browser --cdp http://127.0.0.1:9222 ....
• Cursor alignment. get box returns viewport coordinates. Kiosk Chromium at 0,0 with --force-device-scale-factor=1 makes viewport pixels equal screen pixels, but a small fixed offset may be needed. Take a screenshot mid-beat and adjust if the click misses.
• Window focus for typing. xdotool type goes to the focused window. session.sh activates the Chromium window; if typing lands nowhere, re-activate it before typing.
• Non-Latin languages need CJK fonts. Preflight installs fonts-noto-cjk so Japanese, Chinese, and Korean render instead of tofu boxes. Chromium caches fonts at startup, so if you install fonts after a session is running, restart it (session.sh stop && start); a page reload is not enough.
• drupal.org serves the kiosk browser HTTP 406. Looks like TLS or client-hint fingerprinting: curl from the same container with Chrome-like headers gets 200, the browser (a normal Chrome/* UA) does not, and UA / Accept* / --lang flags do not fix it. Treat intro and module-page beats that open drupal.org as possibly unrecordable, and have a local-slide fallback ready (see the intro caveat under Beat taxonomy).

Common mistakes