One Appliance to Rule Them All
Well, to make them play nice together anyway...
I was looking for a production/staging server build script or appliance that had LAMP, Webmin, Aegir, ISPConfig, and all the Drupal dependencies on top of a long term support (LTS) version of uBuntu.
On top of web and database services, I also wanted email and DNS, open source anti-spam and anti-virus, a firewall, and protection from DOS and other similar attacks. I also wanted all my admin interfaces to use SSL and I wanted secure SMTP enabled.
Basically, I wanted the offspring of a debaucherous affair between Webmin, Aegir, a slightly hardened LAMP, ISPConfig, and Drupal. I wanted - WALID.
Meet WALID. It's that genetically engineered super offspring.
WALID's the output of a build script that smaller-scale Drupal developers can use to quickly build a production server on a Cloud or Dedicated VPS (or download as an appliance). For Drupal developers that need more than shared hosting but aren't experienced in building or maintaining Linux servers, this will get you going. For developers who have reached a certain level in their Drupal-fu but who aren't experienced with Linux, WALID is a relatively secure and stable Drupal-centric production environment that can be managed via secure web interfaces by even non-Linux pros. [This is the goal anyway...]
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
