Cloud Platform

Creating a Drupal site archive for import

After you prepare your application, create a Drupal site archive.

A Drupal site archive is a gzip-compressed .tar file containing the following structure:

  • A single top-level directory containing your application’s Drupal docroot, including the index.php file, the modules and the /includes directory, and sites/*.

    Cloud Platform imports your application’s user-uploaded files from the [docroot]/sites/*/files directory of the directory containing a settings.php file. For more information about docroots, see Docroot definition.

  • The uncompressed MySQL dump file from your Drupal application in the root of the .tar file. This file can have any name, but must have an .sql extension.

The following sample archive file shows the site archive structure of a Drupal 7 application with the tar -tzf archive.tar.gz command that lists the contents of the .tar file:

tar -tzf archive.tar.gz

./your-database-goes-here.sql
./drupal-7
./drupal-7/index.php
[... other Drupal files ...]
./drupal-7/sites
./drupal-7/sites/cleaninstall.localhost
./drupal-7/sites/cleaninstall.localhost/settings.php
./drupal-7/sites/cleaninstall.localhost/files/
./drupal-7/sites/cleaninstall.localhost/files/myimage.jpg

Creating a site archive file with Drush

Important

The drush archive-dump command is incompatible with Drush 9.

  1. Ensure that you have installed Drush version 8. You can download Drush from GitHub.

  2. Go to the Drupal directory and enter the following command:

    drush archive-dump --destination=../mysite.tar.gz

    Drush saves the mysite.tar.gz site archive file to the parent directory of your current Drupal directory. If the command displays error messages, ensure it has the required permissions to save files in that directory.

  3. Copy mysite.tar.gz to your local machine.

Making the site archive file available

To import a site archive file using the Cloud Platform user interface, the file must be located at a publicly accessible URL. You can use services such as Dropbox or Google Drive, or an infrastructure you control.