Drupal distributions

A distribution is a Drupal codebase that arrives with its purpose already built in — a shop, a newsroom, a council website, a farm ledger, a community. Instead of assembling modules yourself, you install a site on a distribution platform and start from a working product.

BOA carries a whole catalogue of them. Each distribution in the catalogue is a ready-made platform: it appears in the Platform drop-down when you create a site, and sites on it get the same panel tasks as any other site — Verify, Clone, Migrate, Backup, Restore, HTTPS. The pages in this topic cover each distribution's specifics: what ships, what to expect on first install, and any quirks worth knowing before you pick one.

How distributions stay fresh

Two kinds of build sit behind the catalogue, and it's worth knowing which is which:

• Rebuilt from upstream — Drupal CMS, Commerce Kickstart, Thunder, LocalGov, farmOS and OpenCulturas are rebuilt from their upstream Composer templates as BOA releases ship, so they track the version their own project currently publishes. The platform name in your panel always shows the exact version you're getting.
• Pinned builds — the rest ship as fixed, known-good builds of a specific version. They install and serve exactly as tested, but they do not chase upstream releases; updating core or modules inside a site you build on them is your own (Composer) workflow, like on any platform you'd add yourself.

The catalogue

Every distribution has a short keyword — the symbol you'd use in your platforms.info control file to request it (your account's ~/static/control/README.txt lists them too). How that file works — including the one gotcha, that it replaces your platform list rather than adding to it, and that ALL is the only future-proof value — is covered in Choosing and managing platforms.

Backdrop CMS is deliberately missing from this table: it's not a Drupal distribution but a platform family of its own, with its own topic in this guide.

Good to know

• Your host decides which of these exist on your server. If a distribution you want isn't in your Platform drop-down, shape your own list with platforms.info (where your plan allows) or open a support request naming the keyword — adding it is quick on the server side.
• Distributions choose their install profile for you. When you create a site on a distribution platform, pick the distribution's own profile in the Install profile field — that's what makes it a Commerce shop or a LocalGov site rather than a bare Drupal.
• First impressions vary by distribution. Some land on a themed front page, some greet you with a login page, one (farmOS) deliberately locks its front page altogether. Each page in this topic tells you what a healthy first install looks like, so you don't mistake by-design behaviour for a broken site.
• Legacy generations are a feature here. Drupal 6 and 7 era distributions stay in the catalogue on BOA's maintained legacy cores — that's the point: sites nobody else will host any more still have a home, and a migration runway to a current platform when you're ready.