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Anca Matei edited this page Feb 20, 2026 · 1 revision

Welcome to the interledger.org v5 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 fifth iteration of the website.

Background

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. This brings us to the fourth version of Interledger.org. It was a conventional Drupal 10 site hosted on a GCP Compute Engine VM instance running Apache and PHP, backed by a Cloud SQL MySQL instance. Both production and staging environments ran on the same VM with separate Apache virtual hosts and databases. The site was fronted by a GCP External HTTPS Load Balancer for SSL termination and routing.

    For version 4, the developer portal was maintained in its own repository , but it was still part of the broader Interledger.org website. The HTTP gateway was configured to proxy requests to /developers to this separate repository.

  5. We are now on the fifth version of Interledger.org. The website and developer portal now live in the same repository, simplifying maintenance and improving deployment workflows. This iteration is built with Astro which allows faster, more modular front-end development, and Strapi as a headless CMS for content management. Drupal had become too heavy and complex for our needs, especially with a redesign on the way. By switching to Strapi, we gained greater flexibility for content modeling, easier integration with static site generation, and a simpler local development setup for editors and developers alike.

Documentation Structure

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

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