One of the main drivers of the Drupal CMS project is to grow Drupal's adoption. So far, most of that effort has gone into making it easier to build sites.

But something we've grappled with since the beginning was: What happens after you've built the site? Where do you host it? There are many options, but they tend to be either cheap and bad, or costly and robust. 

I recently went on this journey for myself with this website, and wrote about what I called "the hosting problem." I ended up using Tome to export the site as static HTML and host it for free on Netlify. Beyond being free, it also means I don't have to worry about any software updates. This works well for a personal website that has only a single author and doesn't get updated very often. 

The current state of hosting

Most Drupal sites have more than one author, and want cloud hosting for their Drupal instance. Their options are:

1. Drupal-specific PaaS hosts, such as Upsun or Acquia. These are excellent products with sophisticated tooling and a great developer experience. They both offer a self-service style option, in contrast to their premium and enterprise offerings. This self-service tier is reasonably priced for the features, but still out of reach for very small or perhaps experimental sites.
2. Shared hosting, such as GoDaddy or Hosting.com. These are generally much cheaper, but the experience is (generously) not great. I know, because I tested 10 of them last year to assess the feasibility of promoting them as pathways for Drupal CMS sites. (Conclusion: not feasible.) Some of them offer an automated install process for Drupal, but this doesn't really work if you built the site locally and want to launch it. 

Removing a potential barrier

We don't have hard data to say that hosting is a barrier to adoption, but it certainly seems plausible. Other platforms offer built-in, often one-command, pathways for multiple platforms. Why not Drupal? 

So we decided to try. The official Drupal CMS roadmap has this item in flight:

Image

And it's now built! With support for Railway and Fly.io. Both platforms offer a trial with some free credit, though Fly.io does require a credit card in order to actually deploy. 

It's only available in the dev branch for now, but it works. If you want to test it out, set up a project with the dev branch (note these steps select the Forma site template, but you can choose any):

mkdir drupal-cms && cd drupal-cms
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web
ddev composer create-project drupal/cms:2.x-dev -s dev --require="drupal/drupal_cms_helper:2.x-dev"
ddev composer require drupal/forma 
ddev drush si ../recipes/forma -y

Then do what you're gonna do, and when you're ready, use the command.

Deploy your site

To deploy to Railway, run:

ddev exec dr deploy:railway

To deploy to Fly.io, run:

ddev exec dr deploy:fly

You'll be prompted to create an account or login, and to add a credit card if you choose Fly.io, and it will create a project with a db and web instance. 

What this actually does

The first time you run the deploy script, it will:

• Install the command line tools for each platform and generate the necessary config
• Export all of your content and config
• Deploy the app using a custom Dockerfile and do a fresh install from the export

On subsequent deploys, as long as there is a valid project reference, it will only deploy the app, including config.

This will be included in the 2.3.0 release of Drupal CMS, which should be released before the end of the year.

Who is it for?

Honestly, we aren't totally sure. It's an experiment. We chose these providers because we had to start somewhere, and they offer the necessary tools. There are lots of other platforms we could target, but we want to validate first that this something people want.

We'd love to hear from people, whether they thing it's worthwhile or not, so reach out in Drupal Slack in #drupal-cms-development.

As usual, this is thanks almost entirely to our lead architect, Adam Globus-Hoenich, who can't resist an interesting challenge.