Vortex
Drupal project template
Vortex is a Drupal project template designed to streamline onboarding, accelerate development, and support long-term maintainability.
It provides a complete foundation for building and deploying Drupal sites — including containerized local environments, automated testing and code quality tools, continuous integration pipeline configurations, and integrations with popular hosting platforms. Everything is pre-configured and ready to use, so teams can focus on building features instead of setting up infrastructure.
By standardizing project structure and tooling, Vortex ensures a consistent developer experience across every project that uses it. Whether you're starting fresh or joining an existing Vortex-based site, you can get up to speed quickly and start contributing right away.
The template is actively maintained and kept in sync with the latest tools. Every change is verified through automated tests to ensure updates remain stable and reliable — reducing the risk of regressions and making it easier to maintain projects over time.
Learn more about Vortex from our DrupalSouth 2025 presentation (Google Slides | PDF).
Why Vortex exists
Setting up Drupal projects can be time-consuming and inconsistent:
- ⏱️ Developers lose hours or days setting up their local, continuous integration, and hosting environments
- ⚠️ Inconsistent setups cause false negatives, undermining the reliability of tools
- 🔌 Lack of understanding of third-party service inner workings slows integration and troubleshooting
- 📉 Poor onboarding documentation affects team productivity
This leads to:
- 😩 Developer frustration and burnout
- ⏳ Project delays and missed deadlines
- 💸 Increased unplanned costs and budget overruns
Vortex was created to solve these challenges by providing a complete foundation for developing and maintaining Drupal projects.
Three pillars of Vortex
📦 Template
- 💧 A pre-configured Drupal project structure with module, theme, and test boilerplate
- 🧰 Pre-configured tools for code quality checks and automated testing
- 🐳 Docker-based environment for local development and cloud hosting
- ☁️ Built-in support for Acquia and Lagoon cloud hosting platforms
- 🏗️ Continuous integration using GitHub Actions or CircleCI
- 📖 Project documentation
➡️ See Features and Architecture
📖 Documentation
- 🌐 Centralised documentation at https://www.vortextemplate.com
- 🗂️ Scaffolded structure for project-specific docs
- 📋 Onboarding checklist to guide team setup
🎛️ Installer
- 📦 Adds boilerplate files based on custom selections
- 🏗️ Renames files and replaces strings during installation
- 🔄️ Allows to update existing installations to a newer boilerplate version
- 🔌 Standalone CLI application extensible with a flexible API to support new integrations
🧱 Solid base for your projects
- 🔄 Upgradable
- 🧪 Automatically tested in many scenarios
- 🛠️ Actively managed and maintained as a product since 2017
- 📚 Heavily documented at www.vortextemplate.com
🚀 Quick start
curl -SsL https://www.vortextemplate.com/install > installer.php && php installer.php
➡️ See Installation
🛟 Getting help
➡️ See Support
🤝 Contributing
➡️ See Contributing
⚖️ License
Vortex is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license. See the LICENSE file for more details.
Head over to the Features or Installation pages to learn more!