Access¶

For Acquia to have access to your websites, be aware of the following:

• Subscribers must give Acquia administrative-level access to all systems and accounts required to perform RA tasks.
• Acquia will perform RA services from its own premises using remote electronic access to subscriber’s systems and accounts.
• Acquia requires access to one or more development or testing servers to ease the testing and deployment of updates in connection with this service.
• Acquia will assist with configuring two QA, development or test servers to support the test and deployment process using a code repository and revision control.
• Acquia will deploy a Environment for each subscription which is used solely for the deployment of automated security updates by Acquia.
• To administer your website from the user interface, Acquia requires an administrative-level user account on your Drupal website.
• Acquia requires full access to your Acquia version control system (VCS) repository.
• For Site Factory subscribers only, Acquia requires a list of representative websites to stage, as described in Special considerations for Site Factory.

Drupal and Module Requirements¶

RA has the following requirements for Drupal and its associated modules.

Drush¶

Drush is required by RA automation to apply both code updates for Drupal 7 websites and database updates for websites running Drupal 7 and the current Drupal version. Acquia Support also uses Drush to troubleshoot and scan websites. Drush is required to work on all environments without error.

Any of the following items must not interfere with running Drush commands (such as drush pm-updatestatus or drush pm-updatecode):

• custom themes
• custom modules
• customizations to the settings.php or sites.php files
• customizations to contributed modules

Installations of the current Drupal version requires Drush 10 installation and configuration in the website’s codebase. A symlink to Drush must be present in vendor/bin if you have installed Drush using Composer.

Composer¶

The current Drupal version, contributed modules, and distributions are increasingly reliant on Composer to manage dependencies. Although Drush will continue to be used to detect insecure modules, only Composer builds and updates will ensure dependencies are included in any Drupal core or contributed module update.

When updating a website running the current Drupal version, the automated update process requires a functional composer.json file located above the docroot directory that includes references to all your website dependencies like Drupal core and contributed modules. Acquia doesn’t recommend changing the composer.json or vendor/ directory located inside of the docroot directory unless you are removing them. See Acquia Automation: Composer builds for a full explanation of requirements.

Special considerations for Site Factory¶

During the initial RA setup process, Site Factory subscribers must give the RA team a list of five to ten domain names to be staged during future RA updates. To speed up delivery, the RA team will stage only the requested websites.

To change the domains staged during RA updates at least two business days before a planned update, contact Acquia Support to give your list of domain names.

Repository size¶

Acquia recommends that you keep your Git repository as small as possible. The RA service clones repositories as part of the update process. Smaller repositories are faster to clone and easier to work with and maintain. Individual files in a repository should be limited 100 MB. If the size of the repository is larger than 2 GB, it can take a long time to backup or copy the database. To keep the overall size of the repository down, clear unnecessary or outdated files and commit history from the repository.

RA environments are provisioned on shared hardware with limited space. Maintaining a small, efficient Git repository is essential to RA’s ability to issue an update branch in a timely fashion. If an RA server is nearing capacity due to a large Git repository, the RA update process will not complete. This can prevent you from receiving RA security updates. You should periodically review the size of your Git repository to ensure that it is as small as possible.

For more information on reducing the size of your Git repository, see Removing large files from Git without losing history.

Administrative language¶

Acquia delivers RA services in English only. For multilingual websites, you must ensure the administrative back end for Drupal is in English. This will improve Acquia’s efficiency in troubleshooting and updating your website.

Continuous integration¶

Acquia RA can’t support websites using continuous integration (CI) development practices, such as Pipelines, Jenkins, and Travis, where build artifacts are pushed to the Acquia-hosted Git repository. RA performs repository updates and examines tags for subscriber production code, and these processes aren’t compatible with continuous integration.

Acquia recommends you either ignore or decline automated update branches provided by RA Automation. To receive notifications about available security updates when they’re released, set your RA preferences to Inform only.

Version control system¶

To track changes to your code, RA requires subscribers to use Git. RA won’t change code without Git in place. Acquia provides Acquia-hosted subscribers a full repository of their choice.

For recommendations about how to use version control, see Using the recommended workflow.

Non-Acquia environments¶

Acquia doesn’t offer RA services to subscribers who aren’t on the Cloud Platform.

Cloud Next¶

• The Acquia database include statement is required in the settings.php file for each multisite in the sites directory. For more information, see Working with databases.
• Cloud Platform creates the AURABot user in your organanization-level team called RA-BOT-team. This user is required for the smooth functioning of the Remote Administration service that provides Drupal security updates to your Cloud Next environments on a weekly basis. Ensure that you do not delete this user.