Water UK

Reliable Drupal Infrastructure Migration Built for Water UK

We migrated Water UK’s Drupal infrastructure from Platform.sh to a dedicated Plesk environment to support their growing digital platform. The new setup improved deployment speed, reduced manual work, and gave their team greater control over the hosting environment.

Technology

Drupal, PHP 8.1, Plesk, GitHub Actions

Industry

Business Services

Project Type

DevOps Migration & Deployment Automation

Country

United Kingdom

About The Project

Water UK manages digital resources and information for water and wastewater service providers across the United Kingdom. Their Drupal platform was running on Platform.sh, but the existing setup offered limited flexibility and control. Deployments required additional effort, and infrastructure changes were difficult to manage.

They reached out to us, seeking a more flexible hosting environment and an automated deployment process. The goal was to reduce manual work, improve deployment reliability, and simplify infrastructure management.

We migrated the platform to a dedicated Plesk server and built an automated deployment workflow using GitHub Actions. This gave their team more control over releases and made day-to-day management much easier.

Key Project Deliverables

We delivered solutions that improved deployment management, server control, and platform performance.

Infrastructure Migration

Migrated the Drupal platform from Platform.sh to a dedicated Plesk hosting environment.

CI/CD Automation

Implemented GitHub Actions workflows to automate testing, validation, and deployments.

Automated Deployments

Configured Git-based deployment workflows that automatically deploy code updates.

Deployment Validation

Added automated checks to verify dependencies and deployment readiness before releases.

Build Automation

Automated Composer installation and Node.js theme build processes during deployments.

Performance Improvements

Configured Redis caching, Solr search integration, and optimized PHP settings for better performance.

Major Project Challenges

Moving away from Platform.sh required rebuilding the deployment process and configuring a new hosting environment. The migration had to be completed without affecting the live website.

Manual deployments were another challenge. The existing process involved multiple manual steps, which increased the risk of deployment errors and inconsistent releases.

The Drupal build process also required careful handling. Composer dependencies, cache clearing, and theme compilation are all needed to run correctly during deployments.

Maintaining consistency between environments was important as well. The client wanted the development, staging, and production environments to behave consistently while minimizing downtime.

Solutions & Impact

We built a new deployment workflow around GitHub Actions and migrated the platform to a dedicated Plesk environment. This provided greater flexibility and removed many of the manual tasks involved in releases.

To improve deployment reliability and infrastructure management, we implemented several upgrades.

Migrated hosting from Platform.sh to Plesk
Built automated CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions
Added Git-based deployment automation
Implemented deployment validation checks
Automated Composer dependency installation
Automated Node.js theme builds
Configured Redis caching
Integrated Solr search services
Optimized PHP runtime settings
Improved deployment monitoring and logging

The new setup made deployments faster and more reliable. Manual release work was reduced significantly, and automated checks helped prevent issues before they reached production. Water UK also gained better control over infrastructure and reduced ongoing hosting costs.