Importing your database¶

This page describes manually importing the database of an existing Drupal application into Cloud Platform, as part of the process of manually importing the entire application. For information about other methods of importing an application, see Importing an existing application.

Important

The process described on this page requires you to install the Drush aliases integration for Cloud Platform before proceeding.

Synchronize databases¶

If you have Drush configured for the source version of your application and your Acquia environments, you can use drush to synchronize them.

To import a single website’s database from a drush alias source, use the drush sql:sync command, replacing [source] and [target] with the Drush aliases for your source and target databases. Because Drush 9 and greater no longer support two remote targets, you will need to arrange for one drush alias to be local by running the command from either application.

drush sql:sync @[source] @[target]

After the import completes, run drush @[target] cr command to rebuild caches.

For more information, see Use Drush to Sync Your Drupal Installations Between Multiple Environments on dev.acquia.com.

To import a single website’s database from a drush alias source, use the drush sql-sync command, replacing [source] and [target] with the Drush aliases for your source and remote databases:

drush sql-sync @[source] @[target]

After the import completes, run the drush @[target] cr command to rebuild caches.

For more information, see Use Drush to Sync Your Drupal Installations Between Multiple Environments on dev.acquia.com.

Dump and restore databases¶

To import a database using command-line tools, complete the following steps:

Create a dump file of your database.
Import the dump file into your new database.
Set up database connections.

Creating a database dump file¶

To export the data stored in your website’s database, create a database dump file from the command line by running either Drush or mysqldump from your Drupal directory:

In Drush 9 and 10, a dump can’t be consistently made from aliases because it ignores output redirection. Instead, go to the source Drupal directory, and then run the following command:

drush @[source] sql:dump --gzip --result-file=../mysite.sql

Drush saves the mysite.sql.gz site archive file relative to your current Drupal docroot. If needed, move the file to a location that has access to your target environment.

If the command returns error messages, ensure Drush has the required permissions to save files in the docroot directory.

For more information, see the Drush 8 documentation.

If you’re not sourcing from the default site, you must specify a matching URI to allow Drush to select the correct site database.

drush @[source] sql:dump --gzip --uri=my.source.com --result-file=../mysite.sql

For more information, see About Drupal multisite installations.

With source Drush alias available, run the following command:

drush @[source] sql-dump --gzip > mysite.sql.gz

Drush saves the mysite.sql.gz site archive file relative to your current directory.

For more information, see the Drush 8 documentation.

If you’re not sourcing from the default site, you must specify a matching URI to allow Drush to select the correct site database.

drush @[source] sql-dump --gzip --uri=my.source.com > mysite.sql.gz

For more information, see About Drupal multisite installations.

Run the following command:

mysqldump -u [db_username] -p[db_password] [db_name] | gzip > [db_filename].sql.gz

where:

[db_username] is the account user name that manages the database.
[db_password] is the password for the database account.
[db_name] is your Drupal database.
[db_filename] is the path and file name of the backed up database’s dump file. Be sure to keep the .sql.gz extension.

After you create the database dump file from your existing database, import the database dump file into the new database.