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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.

Installing the OpenStack CLI on Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan), 20.04 (Focal) or later

2 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

When working with OpenStack as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud-computing platform, it’s rather convenient to be able to interface with it via its command-line interface (CLI). While the service is typically installed on the Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) operating system (OS), which has releases every two years, running the CLI from other OSes, such as interim Ubuntu releases, is often necessary. However, it is currently not possible to install the command-line client with supported Debian packages on Ubuntu 19.

How to add a Hugo-based Docs site to your GitLab Project

7 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

At Consensus, we spend a fair bit of our time building complex Drupal systems and the infrastructure that supports them. In that context, the simplicity of a tool like Hugo caught my attention. Hugo is a static site generator written in Go that has proven elegant and flexible for many situations where a simple (or even slightly complex) website is called for, and the venerable Drupal is overkill. Perhaps one of the best uses we’ve found for this tool is to provide technical documentation for a development project.

Drupal North 2019: Drupal SaaS: Building software as a service on Drupal

1 minute read Published: Author: Colan Schwartz

On Friday, June 14th, I presented this session at Drupal North 2019. That’s the annual gathering of the Drupal community in Ontario and Quebec, in Canada. As I realized I hadn’t yet posted this information yet, I’m doing so now. Session information: Are you (considering) building a SaaS product on Drupal or running a Drupal hosting company? Have you done it already? Come share your experiences and learn from others.

Lando and Drumkit for Drupal 8 Localdev

6 minute read Published: Author: Derek Laventure

Over the last 2 or 3 years, the Drupal community has been converging around a solid set of Docker-based workflows to manage local development environments, and there are a number of worthy tools that make life easier. My personal favourite is Lando, not only because of the Star Wars geekery, but also because it makes easy things easy and hard things possible (a lot like Drupal). I appreciate that a “standard” Lando config file is only a few lines long, but that it’s relatively easy to configure and customize a much more complex setup by simply adding the appropriate lines to the config.

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