Vortex 25.8.0 adds Drupal CMS as a starting point, takes measurable time out of every CI build, makes Lagoon environments reachable from your own terminal, and reworks the installer around clearer prompts. There are no breaking changes.
Drupal CMS as a starting point
Drupal CMS is the packaged, opinionated distribution of Drupal aimed at getting a working site standing quickly, with the common editorial pieces already assembled.
Vortex now supports it as a base. Combining the 2 gives you the fast start of a distribution together with the parts a distribution leaves to you: containers, CI, automated testing, deployment, database refreshes and hosting integration. The starting point is quicker, and the engineering scaffolding around it is the same as on any other Vortex project.
Redis was updated and enabled by default in the same release, so caching is configured from the start.
Up to 5 minutes off every CI build
Vortex used to export and restore the codebase on every CI run. That step exists for artifact deployment, and only artifact deployment needs it.
It now runs when a build is actually deploying an artifact. The saving is around 1.5 minutes on a small project and up to 5 minutes on a larger one, on every build. Across a team's week that is real time, and it is time spent waiting, which is the expensive kind.
A related fix stops CI running twice, and deploying twice, when pushing project/* branches.
Lagoon environments you can reach from your terminal
Drush aliases for Lagoon environments were broken, which meant checking anything on a hosted environment involved going the long way around every time.
They work now. From your host you can run ahoy drush @lagoon.develop status, and from inside the container, drush @lagoon.develop status. Checking a hosted environment is a single command again.
Vortex also installs the Lagoon logs package when Lagoon is the selected hosting provider, so application logs go where the platform expects to find them.
An installer that asks better questions
The installer is the first thing anybody sees, and a confusing prompt at that point costs more than it looks like it should.
- A Starter prompt asks what kind of project you are building, and the surrounding prompt descriptions were rewritten around it.
- Tool selection lets you choose which tools the project includes.
- Configuration file support means the answers can be supplied from a file, which makes an unattended install repeatable.
- Missing tools are reported on first install, so a failure tells you what to install instead of only where it stopped.
- Values already discovered in an existing
.envare preserved.
Tests that fail for the right reasons
A flaky test suite is worse than a thin one, because a team learns to re-run it and stops reading it. Several changes here target exactly that.
- Behat steps enforce reduced motion, so animations stop causing intermittent failures.
- PHPUnit deprecations are reported verbosely and treated as failures, so a deprecated attribute surfaces while it is still cheap to fix.
- PHPStan prefers type declarations in code over docblock comments, so the analysis follows what the code actually does.
- Twig CS Fixer applies the full TwigStandard.
On the workflow side, ahoy download-db --no-cache forces a fresh database download when the cached copy has gone stale, and database downloads from a URL can be unzipped automatically.
Upgrading
There are no breaking changes, so this is a routine update. The CI saving and the Lagoon fixes apply on their own, and Drupal CMS support is there when you next start something new.
A few tidy-ups are worth knowing about if you have customised around them: update.php is no longer scaffolded, default.services.local was renamed to example.services.local, and asset-packagist was removed in favour of a documented alternative for front-end assets.
Full details are in the GitHub release notes(Opens in a new tab/window), and the Vortex documentation(Opens in a new tab/window) covers the installer options.
