Vortex is a unified Drupal project template - one tested foundation your team installs once, picks features from, and pulls upstream updates into for as long as the project lives.
The outcome: every site in your portfolio looks, builds, tests, and deploys the same way. New hires onboard against a familiar stack. CI and hosting integrations come pre-wired. When Vortex releases each month, your project can adopt the upstream changes through the same installer that set it up.
You need every Drupal project in your portfolio to look, build, and ship the same way, whether the team that owns it changes or not. Vortex gives you a tested template, monthly upstream releases, identical CI and hosting integrations across sites, and a paid-support contact for when something has to be someone's problem.
Each new client engagement starts with weeks of setup before any billable feature work begins. Vortex turns that setup into a known cost: one installer, an opinionated baseline your delivery team already knows, and a feature set you choose at install time, so every engagement starts at the same quality floor.
You want new hires productive on day one and CI that does not surprise you on day thirty. Vortex ships pre-wired Docker, GitHub Actions and CircleCI configurations, code quality tooling, a testing harness, and AI-agent project context, so every team in your organization learns the same stack.
You want to write Drupal, not babysit infrastructure. Vortex gives you the same ahoy commands, the same containers, and the same testing scaffolds on every project, so the muscle memory you build on one site transfers to the next.
You need local, continuous integration, and hosting to behave identically and dependency updates to land on a known cadence. Vortex ships one provisioning script that runs in every environment, first-class Acquia and Lagoon integrations, Renovate-driven dependency updates, and opt-in visual regression with a label gate.
Vortex is more than a code template. It ships three pieces 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, PHPMD, 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.
Vortex is built for the whole life of your project, not just the first commit.
- 🚀 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. The provisioning script runs the same way for every developer. New hires onboard against pre-wired tooling instead of 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.
curl -SsL https://www.vortextemplate.com/install > installer.php && php installer.php
Alternatively, clone this repository and edit out the sections you do not need.
➡️ Read the installation guide for the full walkthrough.
The installer ships built-in support for AI coding agents. Run with --agent-help to get full instructions for programmatic installation:
curl -SsL https://www.vortextemplate.com/install > installer.php && php installer.php --agent-helpThe 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.phpThe 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.
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).
Vortex ships a release every month. Subscribe to GitHub releases or follow the updating guide to keep your project current.
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.
See the contributing guide for how to get involved.
