Cloud Platform is an open software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that doesn’t lock in your application. You can export the whole application—code, themes, database, and files—at any time to a site archive file, which you can then use to host your application locally, or use another hosting service.

Exporting an application using Drush

You can also use the Drush command line tool to create a portable site archive file, which you can then install on a different hosting platform if you want. The site archive file created during the export process includes your databases, themes, content, modules, website, and module configuration settings, and users. To create a site archive file:

• Connect to your infrastructure with SSH.

• Run a command similar to the following:

  copy

  drush @site.env archive-dump --destination=mysite.tar.gz

  where [site] is the name of your application on Cloud Platform, [env] is the Cloud Platform environment (one of prod, test, or dev), and the --destination argument is the location where you want the site archive file created.

You can then use scp or another similar tool to download the site archive file.

Exporting an application from Cloud Platform