BLT EOL ResourcesBLT EOL (End Of Life) Resources

Hello, community! Today I’m writing words I never thought I’d be writing: Acquia is announcing BLT’s End of Life (EOL). We will be handling this in several phases in the coming months, and we wanted to give you a heads up so you can begin planning for how to handle this. Official comms will be coming later today to announce this via the usual channels, but we wanted to post it here on the issue queue first. But, the TLDR:

1. BLT will not be updated to support Drupal 11 – so, if and when you plan to upgrade to Drupal 11, Acquia’s BLT will be a blocker if it’s still in your project. The Drupal 11 release date hasn’t been officially announced yet, but look for it in the second half of the year.
2. Acquia will end support of BLT at the end of 2024 (December 31, 2024) and publicly archive the repository at that time

BLT was released nearly a decade ago to help automate and standardize the way we all build and deploy Drupal sites across the Acquia platform. I’m pleased today that the vast majority of the things BLT used to be “the only real solution for” are now present in Acquia’s products (or other tools).

First and most importantly, BLT will continue to function throughout this year and we will do incremental maintenance (as we have these last several years) to ensure you can continue to upgrade to new versions of Drupal 10. However we will not make updates to BLT to support Drupal 11 when it releases later this year. So, for those of you planning on being early adopters of Drupal 11, we strongly encourage you to begin planning ahead as BLT will block your ability to upgrade.

Second, just because Acquia is EOLing BLT doesn’t mean you necessarily have to stop using it. As long as you’re running Drupal 10, BLT should continue to function and operate (even after we publicly archive the repository).

Third, BLT is and always has been an open source project. It is possible that new maintainers could step forward to keep BLT running into the future!

I know many of you have been long-time users of BLT and we appreciate the many issue reports, pull requests, blog posts, tutorials, and in-person meetups / conversations that have taken place over the years. If any of you feel passionately enough about BLT that you are interested in taking it on as a maintainer, please reach out and let us know.

Finally, I recently posted a blog on https://dev.acquia.com/tutorial/you-dont-need-blt-acquia-cloud about how you can successfully build and deploy Drupal at Acquia without BLT. I’d encourage you to check this out if you haven’t seen it already!

A few key features that may require some additional work as you remove BLT. Specifically these are:

• Cloud Hooks – Explore using Cloud Actions on Acquia Cloud Next
• ACSF and Multisite – The Drupal Recommended Settings plugin facilitates the settings capabilities of BLT for multisite.
• SAML – Acquia largely recommends utilizing the SAML Auth module today. Most of our prior work around the “dedicated” SAML capabilities in BLT (and later the BLT SAML Plugin) were related to the complexities surrounding the SimpleSAMLPHPAuth module and PHP library. SAML Auth is much simpler to setup and configure (entirely via Drupal configuration).
• BLT plugins (such as Behat tests) – We recommend exploring composer-based automation for commands contained in BLT plugins (e.g. composer test that will execute the necessary commands for tasks such as automated testing).
• Twig linting – GrumPHP can also be configured to lint Twig. For more information, see https://github.com/phpro/grumphp/blob/v2.x/doc/tasks/twigcs.md