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Welcome to the Interledger.org v4 wiki. Here you can find information about site setup, technical design decisions and background to how we got to the state we are at today. As the name suggests, this is the fourth iteration of the website. It most probably won't be the last.

Background

The first Interledger.org site (or at least, the first one that anyone can remember) was built on Dactyl, and you can see the archived repository at interledger.github.io. It appears there was an attempt at a website refresh built with VuePress but somehow that didn't come to pass.

The website refresh that did go live was built on Jekyll and hosted on CloudCannon. It might have been done by an external agency, but who remembers at this point. Over time, however, the team found it increasingly difficult to make updates to the site and also felt that the design could do with an overhaul, so interledger-website got replaced with the next version.

We had engaged an agency to build this third version of Interledger.org. They chose headless Drupal with a NextJS frontend. The overall new design was quite well-received, however, the handover was not a smooth process. The site implementation had issues, both major and minor, dependency management and the deployment pipelines were also a bit of a mystery. The number of moving parts for a brochure website was a little excessive, and we made the decision to rewrite the entire site. The source code is interledger.org-frontend and interledger.org-backend.

For the longest time the whole website has been hosted using a VM running on EC2, and the database running on a RDS instance. But in Q4 2024 it became clear that we need a staging environment and a smooth way of migrating changes from staging to production. Developers also need a convenient way of testing changes locally. The production and staging environments were migrated to GCP in late 2024, and a local development environment was also created.

And that's where we are now, with the fourth version of Interledger.org. This version is a conventional Drupal 10 site hosted on a GCP Compute Engine (GCE) VM instance running Apache and PHP, backed by a Cloud SQL MySQL instance. Both production and staging environments run on the same VM with separate Apache virtual hosts and databases. The site is fronted by a GCP External HTTPS Load Balancer for SSL termination and routing.

Documentation Structure

This wiki focuses on content creation and site building. For infrastructure, deployment, and DevOps documentation, see the main repository:

• Main Repository README: Project overview and getting started
• CI/CD Documentation: Deployment workflows, backups, and restore procedures
• Infrastructure Guide: Detailed GCP infrastructure architecture and operations
• Local Development Guide: Setting up Docker-based local environment
• Copilot Instructions: Complete infrastructure reference for AI assistance