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Removing BLT from a Drupal Project

By drfuzetto on
Removing BLT

After a careful review and incremental cleanup, I successfully removed BLT (Build and Launch Tool) from a Drupal project—and I’m glad I did.

The primary reason for this change was simple: BLT is no longer actively supported. While it once served an important role in standardizing Drupal 8/9 workflows, continuing to rely on an unsupported layer in a production project introduces unnecessary risk—especially for long-lived sites that need to remain secure, maintainable, and upgrade-ready.

BLT was originally designed by Acquia as an opinionated automation layer that codified Professional Services best practices. Its goal was to streamline building, testing, and deploying Drupal applications while reducing onboarding time and enforcing quality standards.

For this project, however, BLT had become more overhead than value.

Why I Removed BLT

Beyond the lack of ongoing support, BLT was impacting day-to-day development and deployment:

  • Build and deploy steps were harder to reason about
  • Debugging often meant debugging BLT rather than Drupal or CI itself
  • Some tooling assumptions no longer matched modern workflows
  • CI pipelines had already evolved beyond BLT’s conventions

Most importantly, BLT was slowing us down.

What Changed

Most of the work involved simplifying configuration and removing indirection.

Key changes included:

  • Removed BLT completely
    • Deleted the /blt directory
    • Removed blt.development.services.yml
    • Removed BLT-related Composer dependencies
  • Simplified core configuration
    • Added acquia/drupal-recommended-settings
    • Updated trusted_host_patterns directly in settings.php
    • Cleaned up environment logic that was previously abstracted by BLT
  • Modernized CI/CD
    • Removed Travis CI
    • Replaced it with GitHub Actions, keeping automation closer to the code and easier to maintain

The Results

The impact was immediate and measurable:

  • Deployment time was reduced by ~50%
  • Fewer moving parts in the build pipeline
  • Easier onboarding for developers unfamiliar with BLT
  • Clearer ownership of CI and deployment logic
  • A codebase that’s better positioned for future Drupal upgrades

Nothing about this change reduced automation or quality—it simply removed an unsupported abstraction layer and replaced it with tooling the team actively maintains and understands.

Helpful Reference

Acquia has also acknowledged that BLT is not required:

You don’t need BLT to run Drupal on Acquia Cloud.

Final Takeaway

BLT had its place, and for many projects it served its purpose well. But when a tool is no longer supported—and actively slowing delivery—it’s worth reassessing.

In this case, removing BLT reduced complexity, improved deployment performance, and made the project easier to maintain going forward.