MAKERS & BUILDERS - Managing a fleet of custom Drupal sites centrally at CERN

This talk explores how CERN creates and maintains a custom distribution of Drupal, which includes a Composer project, Docker images, CI through GitLab Pipelines, and operational scripts. The speaker discusses the importance of keeping up with the latest Drupal versions for security and other critical updates while addressing the challenges of maintaining compatibility with upstream changes. They detail the automation pipeline developed to build, test, and deploy new versions using GitOps on Kubernetes infrastructure, highlighting the role and effectiveness of each automation component. By the end of the presentation, the audience will see the distribution in action within the CI environment and learn about the current state, future steps, and practical tips for implementing a similar approach. All presented work is open source and publicly accessible.