About environments¶

Cloud Platform uses separate environments in order to help you maintain a clear and orderly workflow as you develop, test, and publish your applications. An application is deployed on each of its environments, but each environment may be in a different state, with its own database and possibly a different code branch or tag deployed. Each environment has a URL at which its application can be viewed, but only the Production environment’s URL is designed to be visible to the application’s users (website visitors).

How many environments your application has depends on the level of your Acquia subscription.

Cloud Platform displays environments in the following order:

• Dev, Stage, and Prod
• Custom environments
• Remote Administration environments
• Cloud Platform CD environments

If your environment is running on Cloud Next technologies, you will also see the following highlighted icon:

Managing environments¶

To view the Overview page of an environment, click the triangle in the breadcrumbs menu on any page in the Cloud Platform interface to identify the environment you want to view, or click the name of the environment on the application’s Environments page.

From the Overview page of an environment, you can complete the following tasks:

• Manage your code, including switching the tag or branch deployed on the environment, or deploying a tag or branch from a different environment.
• Manage your databases, including backing up and restoring databases, and copying databases from a different environment.
• Manage your files, including copying files from a different environment.
• Configure the environment, including PHP settings, production mode, and more.
• Clear the Varnish® cache for the environment.
• Make a fresh Drupal installation in the environment, overwriting your existing application code and database.
• Activate Live Development mode for an environment.
• Rename the environment.
• Understand your Site health by using application performance monitoring.

Information¶

Your Environments overview page also contains basic information about the infrastructure.

The Information section contains the following items:

• Git URL: Infrastructure Git URL (with a Copy link to copy the URL to your computer’s clipboard).
• SSH URL: Infrastructure SSH URL (with a Copy link to copy the URL to your computer’s clipboard).
• Region: Region in which this infrastructure is located.
• Production mode: Displays if the production mode is enabled for the environment.
• PHP version: Infrastructure’s installed version of PHP.
• Live development mode: Whether Live Development mode is enabled for the environment.
  • This feature is not available for environments running on Cloud Next technologies.

The DNS Information section contains the following items:

• Apex domain: IP addresses (A records) for the bare domain name.
• Subdomains: Canonical name (CNAME), or a domain name that maps to the IP addresses listed in the Apex domain section.