Acquia BLT¶

Acquia BLT (Build and Launch Tool), available on GitHub, provides an automation layer for testing, building, and launching Drupal 8 applications. Acquia BLT generates new Drupal projects using a standardized template based on Acquia Professional Services’ best practices.

QUICK LINKS: Install | Release notes | Developer resources | Tech Architect resources | Getting support

To improve efficiency and collaboration across Drupal projects, Acquia BLT provides both a common suite of tools and standardized structure. The tools and structure will help developers reduce incidents of duplicated work, speed up project configuration, and onboard new developers faster.

Using Acquia BLT for your Drupal projects will help you meet the following goals during your development cycles:

Provide a standard project template for Drupal based projects
Provide tools automating the configuration and maintenance work for projects
Document and enforce Drupal standards and best practices through default configuration, automated testing, and continuous integration

Acquia BLT’s scope is discretely defined. It’s not intended to provide:

Drupal application features such as workflow, media, layout, and prefabricated content types
A local hosting environment
A replacement for good judgement (as with Drupal, it leaves you the freedom to make mistakes)

Features¶

Acquia BLT offers the following features for your organization’s use:

Local Git hooks: Evaluate formatting, syntax, and compliance with Drupal coding standards.
Testing frameworks: Provides default configurations for Behat and PHPUnit.
Project automation tasks: Includes commands for syncing environments, compiling front-end assets, and executing tests.
Deployment artifact generation: Includes building production-only dependencies and sanitizing production-environment code.
Continuous integration and deployment tools: Supports both the Acquia Cloud pipelines feature and Travis CI.

Getting started¶

To get started with Acquia BLT, review Acquia BLT installation instructions, and then review the following usage documentation:

Onboarding with Acquia BLT: How to get started on project work.
Repository architecture: How code is organized, and why.
Project tasks: How to complete tasks on your local computer.
Development workflow with Acquia BLT: How to contribute your code to Acquia BLT.
Automated testing: How to write and run tests, and why you should care.
Deployment workflow
Release process
Continuous integration
Open Source Contributions

Videos¶

Releases and versioning¶

Acquia BLT typically has two supported releases at any given time, each corresponding to a major semantic version. The newest supported major version of Acquia BLT will receive bug fixes and new features, and the immediately previous major version will receive only critical bug and security fixes for the next six months. Acquia will release updates for Acquia BLT based on the following schedule for major and minor releases:

New features and bug fixes: The first Wednesday of every month.
Security and bug-fix releases: The third Wednesday of every month (as necessary).

This schedule coincides with the Drupal core release cycle, allowing the use of a single Acquia BLT major release throughout the lifecycle of a Drupal core minor release.

Release support status¶

Acquia BLT version	Support status	Drupal versions	Drush versions
10.x	Supported, stable	8.6 or greater	9.5.0 or greater
9.2.x	Bug fixes only	8.6 or greater	9.4.0 or greater
9.x or earlier	Unsupported	8.5	9.1.0 or greater

Note

When the maintainer of a particular release of any package (such as Drupal or PHP) stops supporting that package, Acquia may end its support for that release in Acquia BLT. For example, as of December 2019, Acquia BLT 10.x will stop supporting Drupal 8.6, and will instead support Drupal 8.7 or greater, based on the Drupal security policy.

For information about end-of-life announcements for Acquia’s products, see Software end-of-life schedule.

Contributing to Acquia BLT¶

If you would like to help improve Acquia BLT, file issues from its GitHub issue queue. For contribution guidelines and instructions, see Contributing to Acquia BLT.

License¶

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and / or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

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