Vortex

Drupal project template

Vortex is a tested Drupal project template. Your team installs it once, picks the features it needs, and pulls in upstream updates for as long as the project lives.

Every site in your portfolio then looks, builds, tests, and deploys the same way. New hires onboard against a familiar stack, and CI and hosting integrations come pre-configured. When Vortex releases each month, your project can adopt the upstream changes through the same installer that set it up.

Who Vortex is for

For CTOs and engineering directors

You need every Drupal project in your portfolio to look, build, and ship the same way, even when the team that owns it changes. Vortex gives you a tested template, monthly upstream releases, the same CI and hosting integrations on every site, and paid support you can escalate to.

For Drupal practice leads and agency principals

Each new client engagement starts with weeks of setup before any billable feature work begins. Vortex turns that setup into a known cost. Your delivery team runs the installer, picks the features at install time, and starts from an opinionated baseline the team already knows, so every engagement begins at the same quality floor.

For tech leads and engineering managers

You want new hires productive on day 1 and CI that doesn't surprise you a month later. Vortex ships Docker, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI configurations, code quality tooling, a testing harness, and project context for AI coding agents, so every team in your organization learns the same stack.

For senior Drupal developers

You'd rather write Drupal than look after infrastructure. Vortex gives you the same ahoy commands, containers, and testing scaffolds on every project, so what you learn on one site carries over to the next.

For DevOps and platform engineers

You need local, continuous integration, and hosting environments to behave identically, and dependency updates to arrive on a known schedule. Vortex ships a single provisioning script that runs in every environment, built-in Acquia and Lagoon integrations, Renovate-driven dependency updates, and opt-in visual regression gated by a PR label.

What is inside Vortex

Vortex has 3 parts that work together:

• 📦 Template - the pre-configured Drupal project: containerized local environment (Docker Compose + Ahoy), GitHub Actions and CircleCI pipelines, Acquia and Lagoon hosting integrations, code quality tooling (PHPCS, PHPStan, Rector, Twig CS Fixer, ESLint), and a testing harness (PHPUnit, Behat with screenshot capture).
• 📖 Documentation - centralized guidance at vortextemplate.com, a scaffold for your project-specific docs, and an onboarding checklist for new team members.
• 🎛️ Installer - a standalone CLI that adds only the features you select, renames boilerplate to your project, and upgrades existing installations to newer Vortex versions.

➡️ See the full feature list and the architecture overview.

Day 1, Month 6, Year 3

Vortex covers the whole life of a project:

• 🚀 Day 1 - Run the installer, pick features, and you have a Drupal site building locally, running in CI, and ready to deploy to staging.
• 🔧 Month 6 - Renovate keeps dependencies current, and the provisioning script runs the same way for every developer. New hires onboard with the tooling already set up instead of relying on tribal knowledge.
• 🛟 Year 3 - Monthly Vortex releases bring upstream tooling, PHP, and Drupal updates. The installer applies them to your project, so it stays current instead of drifting.

Quick start

curl -SsL https://www.vortextemplate.com/install > installer.php && php installer.php

Alternatively, clone this repository and edit out the sections you don't need.

➡️ Read the installation guide for the full walkthrough.

Installing with an AI coding agent

The installer supports AI coding agents. Run it with --agent-help for full instructions on programmatic installation:

curl -SsL https://www.vortextemplate.com/install > installer.php && php installer.php --agent-help

Development version

The latest development build of the installer from the develop branch is at https://vortex-docs.netlify.app/install:

curl -SsL https://vortex-docs.netlify.app/install > installer.php && php installer.php

See Vortex in production

The DrevOps website is a real production Drupal site built on Vortex. It receives regular upstream updates and shows what a long-lived Vortex project looks like in practice: CI configuration, testing workflows, and the update routine teams run between releases.

Use it as a reference for structuring your own Vortex-based site, or as a working example of how the template evolves.

Documentation

The full Vortex documentation lives at https://www.vortextemplate.com. Good starting points:

• Architecture - how the pieces fit together
• Features - the full feature list
• Installation - install into a new or existing project
• Updating Vortex - pull in upstream releases
• FAQs - quick answers to common questions

Documentation is authored under .vortex/docs in this repository and published on each Vortex release. The latest development preview is at https://vortex-docs.netlify.app/.

For a high-level overview, see the DrupalSouth 2025 presentation (Google Slides | PDF).

Releases and roadmap

Vortex ships a release every month. Subscribe to GitHub releases or follow the updating guide to keep your project current.

• Project development board
• Project planning board

Support

Paid support for Vortex covers:

• New and existing project onboarding
• Support plans with SLAs
• Priority feature implementation
• Updates to the latest version of Vortex
• Custom implementations and consulting

Email support@drevops.com.

Community support is on the #vortex-project-template channel in Drupal Slack and on GitHub Issues.

Contributing

See the contributing guide for how to get involved.

License

Vortex is licensed under GPL-3.0. See LICENSE for details.