Over the last couple years, organizations have been coming to us with a new problem. Instead of needing a single website, they need dozens, if not hundreds. They might be large universities with many departments, an association with independent franchises nationwide, or a real estate developer with offerings all over the world. Often, these organizations already have several websites supported by different vendors and technologies. They’ve become frustrated with the overhead of maintaining Drupal sites built by one vendor and Wordpress sites by another. Not to mention the cost of building new websites with a consistent look and feel.

While the details may vary, the broad ask is the same. How can we consolidate various websites onto a single platform that can be spun up quickly (preferably without developer involvement) and update and maintain these en masse, while maintaining enough structure for consistency and flexibility for customization. Essentially, they want to have their cake and would also like to eat it.

Over this series of posts, we’ll break down the various parts of this solution. We’ll first look at Pantheon’s hosting solution, and how its infrastructure is set up perfectly to give clients the autonomy they want. Then we’ll look at the command line tools that exist for developers to easily manage updates to dozens (if not hundreds) of websites. Lastly, we’ll look at the websites themselves and how Drupal 8 was leveraged to provide flexible website instances with structured limits.

Pantheon and Upstreams

Pantheon is a hosting solution designed specifically for Drupal and Wordpress websites. For individual sites they offer a lot of features, however the ones we’re most interested in are single click installations of a new website and single click updates to the code base. Using a feature called Upstreams, users can create fresh installs of Drupal 7, Drupal 8, or Wordpress that all reference a canonical codebase. When new code is pushed to any of those Upstreams, any site installed from it gets notified of the new code, which can be pulled into the instance with the click of a button.

Outside of the default options Pantheon maintains internally, developers can also build their own Custom Upstreams for website creation. Anyone with access to the Upstream can log into Pantheon and click a button to install a new website based on that codebase. In short this codebase will handle installing all of the features every website should have, establish any default content necessary, and be used to roll out new features to the entire platform. This setup allows non-technical users to easily create new websites for their various properties, and then handoff specific websites to their appropriate property managers for editing. We’ll go over more specifics of this codebase in a later post.

Since a developer is no longer required for the creation of individual sites, this frees up a lot of time (and budget) for building new features or keeping on top of maintenance. The process for rolling out updates is simple: the developer writes code for a new feature and pushes it to the upstream repository. Once pushed, every site connected to this upstream will get an alert about new features and a shiny button that pulls them in with a single click.

Pantheon and Organizations

At this point it’s worth mentioning that custom upstreams are a feature of a special account type called an Organization. An organization is used to group multiple websites, users, and Custom Upstreams under one umbrella. Organizations also come with additional features like free HTTPS and code monitoring services. It’s recommended that each organization signup with their own organization account, rather than use one tied to their development partner. This gives them full control over who can create new websites using their Custom Upstream, who can manage all their websites, and who can only access specific websites.

Organization accounts and Custom Upstreams go a long way in helping organizations reduce the overhead they may have from managing several properties simultaneously. Having the option to create an infinite number of websites in-house helps reduce the cost of growth. Having every website using the same codebase means new features can easily be rolled out to the entire platform and security vulnerabilities can be handled quickly.

The only downside with this approach is updates are generally applied one site at a time. The developer can push the code to the Custom Upstream, but it’s necessary to log into every website and click the button to update that site. For a handful of sites, this might be manageable. For dozens to hundreds, this problem becomes tedious. In the next post we’ll look at some of the scripted solutions Pantheon has for applying and managing an ever growing number of websites at once.