Known issues in Acquia Cloud¶

This page describes known issues in Acquia Cloud:

• Multi-region failover does not support multisites

  The Acquia Cloud multi-region failover service supports only a single database per environment.

• Some Drupal modules are not supported on Acquia Cloud

  The design of the Acquia platform can sometimes cause incompatibilities with Drupal contributed modules. Some Drupal modules are not supported on Acquia Cloud; these are listed in Modules and applications incompatible with Acquia Cloud. Other modules can be used on Acquia Cloud, but may require caution or special configuration; these are listed in Modules to use with caution on Acquia Cloud. For information about other software that is incompatible with Acquia Cloud, see Unsupported software.

• XML is not an acceptable file type in support tickets.

  The acceptable file listing on the customer-facing ticket submission page lists XML as an acceptable file type, but XML files are not accepted for upload.

  Workaround

  Place the XML in a .zip file, and attach the .zip file to the ticket.

• Drupal 7 and PHP 7.2

  Drupal 7 is not yet compatible with PHP 7.2. When you create or import a Drupal 7 website on Acquia Cloud, be sure to change your PHP version to a version compatible with Drupal 7, as described in Configuring PHP settings.

• Drupal 8.4 and Drush

  Websites running Drupal versions 8.4 or later must be built using Composer, and updating using Drush will no longer be possible.

• Rebuild caches after updating Drupal

  Customers upgrading their websites to newer versions of Drupal 8 should rebuild website caches after the upgrading. Unexpected errors and problems with some page displays may occur until caches are rebuilt.

• Drush 9 failures

  If you are using Drush 9 in an Acquia Cloud environment, Acquia Cloud may display the following errors, such as:

  • Fatal error: require(): Failed opening required '/var/www/site-php//D8--[sitename]-settings.inc'
  • Drush command terminated abnormally due to an unrecoverable error.

  Workaround

  Drush 9 is not fully supported by Acquia Cloud. To determine if this Drush 9-based behavior is affecting your use of the product, execute the following commands from a command prompt:

  • drush9 php-eval 'var_export($_ENV['AH_SITE_NAME'] , true);'
  • printenv 'AH_SITE_NAME'

  These values should be equal. If they are not:

  1. Edit your website’s settings.php file.
  2. Before the Acquia require line, add $_SERVER['PWD']=DRUPAL_ROOT;.
  3. Save the settings.php file.

• Using vendored Drush may disable some Drush commands

  Including Drush in an Acquia Cloud application branch may create a conflict between the version installed in the vendor directory and the version installed in Acquia Cloud, disabling some Drush commands. Most notably, it disables Install distribution, which allows you to install a different version of Drupal into the deployed branch.

  Workaround

  Modify the existing branch by removing Drush from from the branch you wish to install a Drupal distribution into, or create a new branch without the Drush dependency.

  Drush is generally found in one of the following directories:

  • vendor/drush
  • docroot/vendor/drush

  If you are using Composer, you can use it to remove Drush by executing the following command:

  composer remove drush/drush

  See Vendored Drush known issue for additional details.

• Drush aliases and on-demand environments

  Drush aliases for Acquia Cloud CD environments are only downloaded if the environment is active.

• Failures when running update.php with Drush

  Attempting to run update.php on Drupal 8 will fail with the following error message:

  In order to run update.php you need to either be logged in as admin or have set $settings['update_free_access']

  Workaround - Use one of the following methods:

  • Run drush updbs to complete database updates.

  • Whenever you need to run update.php, use your browser’s cookie manager to grab the session cookie from your current authenticated Drupal session, and then remove the leading S from the session name.

  • If you are running updates on your Dev or Stage environments, temporarily disable HTTPS while running updates.

  • Edit your settings.php file to temporarily set $settings['update_free_access'] to TRUE during your updates.

  • ADVANCED - Add the following code to your update.php file (directly following the use statements) to force Drupal to acknowledge the X-Forwarded-Proto value when determining if the request should be treated as HTTPS:

    if (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"]) &&
       $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"] == "https") {
        $_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
       }
    

• Unicode characters and emoji are not supported in branch names

  If a branch name contains a Unicode character, such as an emoji, users will receive a Failure due to fatal system error message when attempting to switch to that branch. This error affects all Acquia Cloud systems, including the pipelines feature.

• Deployed branches cannot be deleted

  Acquia Cloud does not allow you to delete branches that are deployed to an environment. If you attempt to delete a branch from the command line, an error message similar to the following will be displayed:

  remote: Operation rejected: remote: Git branch or tag test_branch cannot be deleted because it is currently deployed to testsite.prod

• Acquia Connector request timeouts

  When a Drupal website is connected to an Acquia subscription, it sends heartbeat requests during each cron run. By default, cron runs at the beginning of each hour, which can cause the Acquia subscription service to receive thousands of simultaneous connections across all subscriber websites. This can cause some requests to timeout.

  Workaround

  If your subscription service is experiencing timeouts, Acquia recommends that you modify your cron runs to not begin at the start of the hour.

• Acquia Connector module conflicts with Remote stream wrapper module

  The Acquia Connector module has a conflict with the Remote stream wrapper module. Workaround Apply this patch, available on Drupal.org.

• Altering the $databases array causes connection errors

  Websites altering the $databases array in settings.php to enable third-party database connections may experience connection errors when the connection setup is delayed in settings.php. For help, see Modifying the database connections within Drupal.

• Memcache configuration and upgrades for Drupal 8 websites

  Although Acquia recommends the use of the Memcache API and Integration module with Drupal 8-based applications, the module is undergoing rapid development. Before you upgrade the Memcache API and Integration module, review Using Memcached and the README.txt file included with the module for updated installation and configuration instructions.

• Deprecated memcache class in PHP 7

  Memcached support in PHP 7 environments is provided by the php-memcached extension. This provides the memcached PHP class for interacting with Memcached storage. It does not provide the memcache (no d) class, which was previously provided by the PECL memcache extension in PHP 5.x environments. This should not affect most users, as the Memcache API and Integration module supports both classes. However, other tools may rely exclusively on the deprecated memcache class, which can cause website issues if PHP is upgraded to version 7. If you use SimpleSAMLPHP, be aware of the work being done to address this issue.

• Legacy alerts from New Relic fail with the removal of TLS 1.0

  Legacy alerts from New Relic fail with the removal of TLS 1.0 from Acquia systems. For help in updating your alerts, see: Transition from legacy alerting to New Relic Alerts and Availability monitoring (legacy).

• Git checkouts fail after reporting non-existent changes to binary files

  Git checkouts fail with the following error when non-text files contain a specific byte sequence and are not explicitly defined as binary files: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout. Please, commit your changes or stash them. Workaround Edit the following section of your .gitattributes file:

  # Auto-detect text files, ensure they use LF.
  *         text=auto eol=lf
  

  and then make one of the following changes:

  • Remove the line beginning with *
  • Remove the eol=lf text
  • Ensure that a specification line is added for every binary file extension used in your repository

• Error message when pushing code to Git

  When attempting to push code, some users may encounter errors similar to the following:

  remote: error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database ./objects

  This can happen when a directory is owned by the root account instead of the siteuser account. Contact Acquia support to correct the directory’s ownership settings.

• Using Midnight Commander can cause gluster service interruptions

  Acquia Cloud Enterprise customers who use GNU Midnight Commander can experience service interruptions when trying to access their GFS mount. Because of this, Acquia currently recommends that you do not use this software with your Acquia-hosted websites.

• Importing a site archive from a local file

  The Acquia Cloud interface does not support importing a site archive from a local file using the UI. Instead, you can import a site archive from a URL or import using Drush.

• Theme change issues with Twig caches on Drupal 8

  Drupal 8 applications on Acquia Cloud Enterprise can experience issues where cached Twig templates fall out of sync on different web server instances when changes to themes are being made and a code deployment has been performed. The problem arises from having separate copies of the compiled Twig templates on each web server instance and a related Drupal core issue.

  Workaround

  When you make changes to themes in Drupal 8 applications on Acquia Cloud Enterprise, connect to each web server instance, and then run a command similar to the following to remove the outdated Twig templates:

  drush @[sitename].[prod] --uri=http://[site_URL]/ ev '\Drupal\Core\PhpStorage\PhpStorageFactory::get("twig")->deleteAll();'

• Backups page may not list all available backups

  The Backups page in the Acquia Cloud interface lists recent backups for the Acquia Cloud environment. However, there is a delay between the time when backups are created and when they are added or removed from the Backups page. As a result, the most recently created backups may not yet be listed, while older backups that have been replaced and deleted may be listed, but not in fact be available for download or for restoring the database.

  Workaround

  You can connect to your server using SSH, SFTP, scp, or rsync, and download the backup files from the /mnt/files/[site].[env]/backups directory. For more information, see Downloading database backups from the command line.

• AuthUserFile in .htaccess is not supported

  The AuthUserFile directive in the Apache .htaccess file sets the name of a text file containing a list of users and passwords for user authentication. Using AuthUserFile is not supported in Acquia Cloud, since its value must be either an absolute path or a path relative to the server root, and therefore won’t work across different Acquia Cloud environments.

• SymLinksIfOwnerMatch in .htaccess is not supported

  Due to the configuration of directory ownership and permissions for your Acquia Cloud application’s codebase and files directories, use of the SymLinksIfOwnerMatch option in your application’s .htaccess file will prevent your web server from being able to access any of the assets in your files directory. The FollowSymLinks option should be used instead.

• The server resize Cancel button does not always work

  In the legacy Acquia Cloud interface, when a user clicks Resize and then clicks Cancel, occasionally the cancel button does not dismiss the dialog box.

• Some environment names in the updated Acquia Cloud interface have changed

  After the updated Acquia Cloud interface was released on December 13, 2016, in a few cases some environment names changed to unexpected values.

  Workaround

  Rename the affected environment to use the desired name. For information about how to rename an environment, see Working with environments.

• zlib “freed prematurely” message when inspecting tasks

  When inspecting the output of any successful or failed task, the final line is: zlib(finalizer): the stream was freed prematurely. This message in the task’s output does not indicate a specific issue, and can be ignored.

• Value of LOGNAME changed in Acquia Cloud 1.109

  Do not use the LOGNAME environment variable to determine sitegroup or sitename in your .htaccess file or in other custom scripts.

  Workaround

  Use the AH_SITE_NAME, AH_SITE_GROUP, or AH_SITE_ENVIRONMENT environment variables if you need environment-aware variables in your scripts.