Acquia Migrate Accelerate (AMA) lowers the barrier to entry for site builders to perform Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migrations. However, your Drupal 7 site might have issues such as data model issues, which make the migration challenging and may need to be resolved. AMA provides insight into some of the changes that you need to make to your Drupal 7 site to migrate successfully, and insight into issues that you need to resolve on your Drupal 9 site. The changes in Drupal 7 tend to be data integrity problems that also affect the Drupal 7 site, such as missing values for the required fields.
Finally, after you complete the migration with AMA, custom modules and your custom theme need to be rebuilt as they cannot be migrated.
AMA extends Drupal’s powerful migration system by adding an intuitive user interface. It also provides support for hundreds of the most popular contrib modules. AMA automatically migrates you into Drupal 9 best practices, and includes data integrity checks with automatic suggestions on how to resolve migration messages to save your team’s countless hours.
For example, many competing files and media modules of Drupal 7 get their data migrated into Drupal 9 core’s media module. The data is then available through the Media Library.
Yes, you can do the following:
sites/sites.php
file. If the file is
available, ensure that the default domain name of your source environment is
configured to use the site directory that you want to migrate. If there’s
only one site directory, AMA uses that one. Otherwise, it uses the default.
If there are multiple site directories and none is specified as default, the
migration environment fails to create successfully.WELCOME
tag. If the tag is removed,
create a dummy “welcome” tag to avoid issues. The dummy tag can be empty
with only a text file.Yes.
AMA does not officially support multi-site migrations. However, you can migrate one site at a time with AMA.
AMA is included with all Acquia Cloud Enterprise subscriptions. It is not available for Acquia Cloud Professional or Site Factory subscriptions. Reach out to your account manager to request the addition of AMA to your subscription. Then, ensure to set up the correct permissions for any non-admin users.
AMA generates a Drupal 9 codebase with the modules that you need to recreate your Drupal 7 site. After the codebase is generated, AMA helps you migrate your configuration, content types, and content to the new site. AMA does not migrate custom modules, views, or your custom theme. You can recreate them on your Drupal 9 site.
AMA includes a CD Environment specifically for your migration. This environment does not count against your CD Environment entitlements. AMA also includes a new Drupal 9 application with a new database and filesystem. You will also have access to the AMA module, and the Recommendations Engine that identifies the best Drupal 9 equivalents for your Drupal 7 modules.
The migration to Drupal 9 is a good opportunity to re-envision your site. AMA helps you perform a lift-and-shift migration from your Drupal 7 site to a new Drupal 9 site, and does not give you the opportunity to make big changes as part of the migration process. You can make changes to your site after you migrate everything you want to carry over to your Drupal 9 site.
The Recommendations Engine automatically includes the recommended migration path for every Drupal 7 module that is Drupal 9 compatible. Acquia updates this list regularly as more Drupal 7 modules are ported to Drupal 9. Acquia’s team has vetted the upgrade path for a subset of these modules, and includes patches to improve the migration as needed. The team has vetted over 200 Drupal 7 module upgrade paths so far, and is actively vetting new ones. Sometimes, certain modules claim to be Drupal 9 compatible, but they are actually not compatible. AMA’s Recommendation Engine also handles this for you.
Yes. After your Drupal 7 site runs through the Recommendations Engine, a Drupal 9 codebase is generated, and it includes the modules that you will need for your Drupal 9 site. The Modules tab in the AMA UI shows you the original Drupal 7 modules, with the Drupal 9 equivalents. The modules that are vetted by Acquia are automatically installed and enabled. Acquia is confident that they correctly migrate data for the vast majority of sites. You will have the opportunity to enable the recommended modules that are not vetted by Acquia. They are already downloaded using Composer, but not yet installed in Drupal.
Yes. AMA will automatically include these modules and automatically install the ones that Acquia’s team has vetted.
No, AMA cannot migrate views because Drupal cannot migrate views. However, it migrates everything you need to recreate your views.
No. AMA is specifically designed for Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration. Acquia recommends Acquia Migrate Re-Platform for migrations from other CMSes to Drupal 9.
AMA makes a copy of your Drupal 7 site’s production database and filesystem, and uses the copy as the migration source. Therefore, your production site does not have to support extra load during migrations.
Acquia knows that you’re always adding new content to your Drupal production site. To get the latest content to your in-progress Drupal 9 site, use the Refresh button in the Acquia Cloud UI to copy over the live production database and files to the migration environment. If you make significant changes to your Drupal 7 site (beyond adding/editing content), you may want to create a new migration environment to ensure that you include those changes in your Drupal 9 site.
No. Your Drupal 9 site remains in the “Read Only” mode until you promote your site to Dev or Stage, and remove the AMA module. This is by design — your Drupal 7 production site is the source of record for new content to prevent data loss on your new Drupal 9 site during the migration process.
You can create and tweak the configuration. For example, you can create views on your new Drupal 9 site. If you need to create a new migration environment, Acquia recommends that you export your configuration before doing so, to avoid having to repeat this work. You can re-import the exported configuration to your new migration environment.
When you click the Promote button, you can choose to promote your site to Dev or Stage. After selecting an environment, the Drupal 9 site is copied and promoted to the selected environment. The AMA module remains installed, but you cannot do migration activities on the promoted Drupal 9 site. The migration environment continues to exist, ready to do additional migration activities, if you choose to do so. For more information, see Finishing your Drupal 9 site.
When you are done with the migration, the AMA UI indicates that all migrations have completed. In addition, your migration should meet the following criteria:
At this point, you can promote your migration environment into your ACE subscription’s Dev or Staging environment using the Promote button in the Cloud Platform UI. After completing this step, uninstall the AMA Drupal module in the environment you promoted it to. This removes AMA-specific database tables and disables the “Read Only” mode.
The last 10-20% of a migration may require you to port your custom modules, or work through issues with your Drupal 7 site that are highlighted on the Messages tab in the Migrate UI. You may need to engage with Professional Services to work through these final pieces of the migration.
Working with CD environments.
When you’ve finished migrating your site with AMA, you should do a final refresh of the content, and then promote your site to Dev or Stage using the Promote button in the Cloud Platform UI. For more information, see Finishing your Drupal 9 site.
Acquia CMS and AMA don’t work together. AMA cannot transform data of existing sites to fit into Acquia CMS’s data model. You can use Acquia CMS, but it won’t display your D7 data.
AMA is more than a module as it also includes auto-generating a D9 site based on your D7 site. However, there is an AMA module for Drupal and it runs in Drupal 9. Basically, AMA spins up a new D9 site, including the AMA module. You gradually migrate your D7 data to D9 by interacting with the AMA module.