About Drush on Acquia Cloud¶

Local development best practices¶

Acquia recommends you develop your codebase locally, using Composer to build your codebase, and Acquia Dev Desktop to sync your code between your local environment and Acquia Cloud, rather than attempting to manage code or modules remotely on Acquia Cloud.

You can change your application’s code, use Drush locally to install or update modules, and then send the changes to Acquia Cloud using version control or Acquia Dev Desktop.

Using Drush on Acquia Cloud¶

Although multiple versions of Drush (Drush 6 to Drush 9) are pre-installed on Acquia Cloud, Acquia recommends you require a site-local Drush as part of your codebase, and run your commands with a specific major version of Drush. Running the globally-installed version of Drush is dangerous because the behavior of your cron jobs, Cloud Hooks, or other automated scripts may change unexpectedly when a new version of Drush becomes the default.

Drush commands not specifying a version of Drush will default to Drush 8.

You can use Drush with your applications after you enable SSH access to connect to Acquia Cloud using SSH.

Specifying a version of Drush in commands¶

To run a specific version of Drush, specify the major version in the drush command. For example, to run Drush 7, use the command drush7.

If you want to change your personal default Drush version, you can set an alias for drush in a .bashrc file. For example, to make the drush command run Drush 7 on interactive bash commands, add this to your ~/.bashrc file:

alias drush=drush7

This alias will have no effect during cron jobs or Cloud Hooks. To use a specific version of Drush in a cron command, you must call it directly, as in the following example:

/usr/local/bin/drush7

When you run Drush on your local machine and use a remote Drush alias for your Acquia Cloud application (such as those described in Using Drush aliases), the remote Drush command cannot check for a site-local version of Drush, and will instead run the default version of Drush on Acquia Cloud.

Acquia recommends you run Drush commands by specifying the docroot, replacing [site] with your sitename and [env] with your environment, as in the following example:

drush --root=/var/www/html/[site].[env]/docroot

To run a specific version of Drush on Acquia Cloud when you use a remote alias, edit the alias file in the $HOME/.drush folder on your local machine to specify the version you want. For example:

$aliases['dev'] = array(
  'path-aliases' => array(
    '%drush-script' => 'drush7',
  ),
  // ... other alias settings here
);

Related topics¶

• Official documentation for Drush
• Drush command reference
• Introduction to Drush
• Using Drush aliases
• About SSH/Shell access