As a website developer in Cloud Platform, be default you have access to three hosted environments for your development and deployment: Development, Staging, and Production. You also have access to a fourth, additional environment: the local development environment on your computer. Having a local development environment allows you to obtain quick feedback regarding changes that you make to your website, all before you commit code to the Cloud Platform code repository.

Using Drush when developing locally

When using Drush during website development, use the following argument with Drush commands to direct Drush to use the settings.php in the [docroot]/sites/localhost directory:

-l http://localhost/example

where http://localhost/example is the address of your website.

As an example, the following Drush command downloads the currently recommended version of the Acquia Purge module, while using the localhost version of settings.php:

drush dl acquia_purge -l http://localhost/example

Developing locally using other tools

If you do not want to use the code management workflow tool included with Cloud Platform, you can use the tool of your choice to manage your Cloud Platform code repositories.

To deploy code across environments using the command line:

• Connect to the target environment using SSH.

• In the command prompt window, enter a command similar to the following:

  copy

  git clone trunk tags/2011-03-18 git commit -a -m "Created new tag"

Managing your code with other tools

-l http://localhost/example

drush dl acquia_purge -l http://localhost/example