This page describes manually importing the files of an existing Drupal application into Cloud Platform, as part of the process of manually importing the entire application. For information about other methods of importing an application, see Importing an existing application.

Cloud Platform stores user-uploaded files of a Drupal application (the /files directory) on a network filesystem shared across web nodes. The network filesystem for your application is accessible as /mnt/gfs/[SITE].[ENV] (also accessible as /mnt/files/[SITE].[ENV]), where [SITE] is the name of your application on Cloud Platform and [env] is the Cloud Platform environment (such as prod, test, or dev). These files directories are subdirectories of the network filesystem, such as /mnt/files/[site].[env]/sites/[subsite]/files. For more information about the file system, see Working with files.

In your deployed Drupal docroot, which is on the local disk for performance, Cloud Platform creates a symbolic link from the files directory to the actual files directory in the network filesystem. This symlink allows Drupal to access the files in the location it expects.

For example, [docroot]/sites/default/files is set up to be a symbolic link to /mnt/files/[site].[env]/sites/default/files. Cloud Platform creates this symbolic link in any subdirectory of docroot/sites containing a file named settings.php. If you have a multisite configured with the file docroot/sites/example.com/settings.php, Cloud Platform creates docroot/sites/example.com/files as a symbolic link to /mnt/files/[site].[env]/sites/example.com/files.

To import your user-uploaded files to your Cloud Platform application:

1. Enable SSH access to your infrastructure.

2. Upload your files to the user-uploaded files directory using the sftp, scp, or rsync command. This directory is /mnt/files/[SITE].[ENV]/sites/default/files or, for multisite installations, /mnt/files/[SITE].[ENV]/sites/[sitedir]/files. For more information, see Understanding files. For examples of using rsync, see rsyncing files on Cloud Platform.

Importing your files