Secure Shell (SSH) is a secure network protocol you can use to sign in to your Cloud Platform environments and use command-line tools.

SSH address

To sign in to an environment with SSH, you will need environment’s SSH address or URL. You can find the SSH URL for an environment in the Cloud Platform user interface on the environment’s Overview page.

Each environment’s SSH URL has the initial format [application name].[environment name] where:

• [application name] is the name of your application.
• [environment name] is the environment name, frequently one of dev, test, or prod. When you specify an environment, your PATH and other environment variables are configured the same way as they are for web processes, cron jobs, and Cloud hooks. In particular, the version of PHP you have configured appears first in the PATH, and is the default in your SSH session.

Limitations on shell access

Technical requirements necessary for maintaining a highly available and redundant hosting platform put limits on what you can access and do using shell access on Cloud Platform:

• Limited file access: You must store files in the persistent network filesystem directory at /mnt/files/[application name].[environment name].
• No root access: You do not have root access, even if your application runs on a dedicated cloud infrastructure.
• Write access to your Drupal docroot: Use Git to manage your code on Cloud Platform. By default, you cannot use shell access to install or update modules or to make other changes to your Drupal docroot directory here: /var/www/html. To make changes to your Drupal docroot directory, enable Live Development on a non-production environment. Live development is not available for production environments.
• Session timeout: Your SSH session will time out or expire after 15 minutes of idle time.
• No read-only access: Cloud Platform does not support a "read-only" SSH session with limited access to Drush, database, site files, and so on. If you get SSH access through the Teams and Permissions feature in Cloud Platform, your SSH session has the same permissions as other users in the team that have SSH access. This includes but is not limited to:
  • Read-only access to Git-controlled files
  • Read-write permissions for site files, for example, docroot/sites/*/files folders
  • Read-write permissions to run Drush commands
  • Access to the database 

SSH in Cloud Next

For environments running on the Cloud Next technologies:

• A short delay of around 30 seconds might occur in connecting to any environment that is not accessed recently. With this delay, Acquia can provision customers sessions efficiently and maintain enhanced security standards for the platform.
• Some system commands available on the current version of the Cloud Platform may not be available when using SSH to access a Cloud Next environment.
• Drush aliases may need to be downloaded again for environments upgraded to Cloud Next.
• SSH sessions do not stay open indefinitely and may be discontinued during normal platform operations, such as code deployments or system updates. When such events occur, SSH sessions have a one hour grace period to exit. When this happens, a warning is broadcasted to the affected interactive SSH sessions every five minutes.
• When you trigger code deployment on an environment, the system displays a warning message to the users in SSH sessions. The message warns such users that the code in their SSH session is outdated and that they should restart the session. Otherwise, the session is terminated in an hour.
• Database backups are no longer available in SSH sessions. You can use Acquia CLI, the Cloud Platform user interface, or Cloud API v2 for database backup retrieval.
• New SSH sessions automatically use the latest deployment available.

• To initiate SSH sessions for environments provisioned on Cloud Next, use the following syntax:

  ssh <SSH_URL>

  Here, SSH_URL is the value displayed on an environment’s overview page in the Cloud Platform user interface.

  

• The ssh syntax and default domain syntax for Prod environments initially created on Cloud Next are updated for consistency to resemble the syntax of non-production environments. This change does not impact existing Prod environments.

Frequently asked questions

Managing applications using the command line

Limitations on shell access

Technical requirements necessary for maintaining a highly available and redundant hosting platform put limits on what you can access and do using shell access on Cloud Platform:

• Limited file access: You must store files in the persistent network filesystem directory at /mnt/files/[application name].[environment name].
• No root access: You do not have root access, even if your application runs on a dedicated cloud infrastructure.
• Write access to your Drupal docroot: Use Git to manage your code on Cloud Platform. By default, you cannot use shell access to install or update modules or to make other changes to your Drupal docroot directory here: /var/www/html. To make changes to your Drupal docroot directory, enable Live Development on a non-production environment. Live development is not available for production environments.
• Session timeout: Your SSH session will time out or expire after 15 minutes of idle time.
• No read-only access: Cloud Platform does not support a "read-only" SSH session with limited access to Drush, database, site files, and so on. If you get SSH access through the Teams and Permissions feature in Cloud Platform, your SSH session has the same permissions as other users in the team that have SSH access. This includes but is not limited to:
  • Read-only access to Git-controlled files
  • Read-write permissions for site files, for example, docroot/sites/*/files folders
  • Read-write permissions to run Drush commands
  • Access to the database 

SSH in Cloud Next

For environments running on the Cloud Next technologies:

• A short delay of around 30 seconds might occur in connecting to any environment that is not accessed recently. With this delay, Acquia can provision customers sessions efficiently and maintain enhanced security standards for the platform.
• Some system commands available on the current version of the Cloud Platform may not be available when using SSH to access a Cloud Next environment.
• Drush aliases may need to be downloaded again for environments upgraded to Cloud Next.
• SSH sessions do not stay open indefinitely and may be discontinued during normal platform operations, such as code deployments or system updates. When such events occur, SSH sessions have a one hour grace period to exit. When this happens, a warning is broadcasted to the affected interactive SSH sessions every five minutes.
• When you trigger code deployment on an environment, the system displays a warning message to the users in SSH sessions. The message warns such users that the code in their SSH session is outdated and that they should restart the session. Otherwise, the session is terminated in an hour.
• Database backups are no longer available in SSH sessions. You can use Acquia CLI, the Cloud Platform user interface, or Cloud API v2 for database backup retrieval.
• New SSH sessions automatically use the latest deployment available.

• To initiate SSH sessions for environments provisioned on Cloud Next, use the following syntax:

  ssh <SSH_URL>

  Here, SSH_URL is the value displayed on an environment’s overview page in the Cloud Platform user interface.

  

• The ssh syntax and default domain syntax for Prod environments initially created on Cloud Next are updated for consistency to resemble the syntax of non-production environments. This change does not impact existing Prod environments.

  Environment	SSH	Default domain
  Existing Prod environments:	mysite.ssh.prod.acquia-sites.com	mysite.prod.acquia-sites.com
  New Prod environments:	mysiteprod.ssh.prod.acquia-sites.com	mysiteprod.prod.acquia-sites.com

Frequently asked questions