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Creating a Drupal site archive for import

Importing a site archive

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

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

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

    Acquia Cloud imports your application’s user-uploaded files from the [docroot]/sites/*/files directory of the directory that contains a settings.php file.

  • 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

  1. Verify that Drush version 4.5 or later is installed. Drush 8 is recommended. You can download Drush from GitHub. You may need to install Composer as a prerequisite for installing Drush. Drush is also included with Acquia Dev Desktop.

  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 that it has the required permissions to save files in that directory.

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

Making the site archive file available

To import a site archive file using the Acquia Cloud interface, the file must be located at a publicly accessible URL. You may be able to use a service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, or a web server that you control.

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