Introducing Config Enforce

6 minute read Published: Author: Christopher Gervais

Introduction to the Introduction Over the last few years we’ve built lots of Drupal 8 sites, and some Drupal 9 ones too, both for our clients and for ourselves. As such, we’ve taken a keen interest in (read: faced many challenges with) the Configuration Management subsystem. This was a major new component in Drupal 8, and so, while it’s functional, it isn’t yet mature. Of course, the vibrant Drupal developer community jumped in to smooth the rough edges and fill the gaps, in what has since become known as CMI 2.

Developing a Low-Cost High-Impact Site

4 minute read Published: Author: Seonaid Lee

One of our core principles is solidarity with each other and with our communities. As a part of living this principle, Consensus takes on occasional projects that have the potential for high impact but lack the necessary budget for custom development. We have some standard templates for such projects, so we can spin them up quickly for review by the clients, and deploy them to low- or no-cost hosts, appropriate to the amount of traffic they are expecting.

Kubernetes Won't Save You

11 minute read Published: Author: Seonaid Lee

Kubernetes is popular and trendy. It is, however, overpowered for most projects and introduces unnecessary levels of complexity and overhead. A monolithic architecture is likely to be sufficient for most new projects, and makes it more likely that you will eventually develop the need for the sort of scaling supported by microservices.

Protecting your cloud networks with WireGuard VPN and Ansible

6 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Why use a VPN? Within cloud computing, there are various types of sites and services not meant for public consumption (e.g. analytics software, databases, log servers, etc.). For security reasons, it’s best to keep these accesssible only via the private network, which is behind the firewall. To provide access to these resources, a virtual private network (VPN) should be used, with network access granted only to trusted individuals within the organization.

Does your Drupal hosting company lack native Composer support?

2 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Best practices for building Web sites in the Drupal framework (for major versions 8 and above) dictate that codebases should be built with the Composer package manager for PHP. That is, the code repository for any sites relying on it should not contain any upstream code; it should only contain a makefile with instructions for assembing it. However, there are some prominent Drupal hosting companies that don’t support Composer natively. That is, after receiving updates to Composer-controlled Git repositories, they don’t automatically rebuild the codebase, which should result in changes to the deployed code.

Aegir 5 is coming, and not just for Drupal!

2 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

Aegir is the one-and-only FLOSS hosting system for Drupal sites that’s been around for over 10 years, a rock in the community. While Drupal hosting companies have come and gone, Aegir’s always been there for folks who want to host Drupal sites themselves. According to recent data at the time of this writing, there are 567 instances (that we know about). It’s used by organizations worldwide such as the US National Democratic Institute, NASA, and the European Commission.