Preparing a Drupal application for export¶

Before you import your Drupal application to Cloud Platform, perform the following tasks to prepare your application for the import process. This will help you better prevent, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues that arise as you change your hosting environment.

To prepare your application for export:

1. Perform all outstanding Drupal core and module updates in your current environment.

2. Remove any disabled Drupal modules that you aren’t using.

3. Reconfigure your application to use Memcached. Cloud Platform servers use Memcached. If you’re coming from another hosting provider that uses Redis or some other storage mechanism, you’ll need to reconfigure your application to use Memcached.

4. Connect to Acquia Insight to ensure your application is ready to go for launch. We recommend you install the Acquia Connector module, which feeds data to Acquia Insight. Acquia Insight has a long list of recommended configurations. Learn more about installing the Acquia Connector and review the Checklist for migrating your website to Cloud Platform for more details about the checks we recommend and what Acquia Insight looks for.

5. Test your application by clicking through your application and making sure features and performance are as expected. Make sure there are no JavaScript errors in your browser’s console. Check the error logs to ensure that everything is running correctly.

6. Make sure you do not have a PHP memory limit set in your .htaccess or Drupal settings.php files. If your application is configured with a larger PHP memory limit than the memory limit configured on your Cloud Platform server, it won’t be able to start up.

7. Large files or directories in your docroot, such as /photo or /video, can cause problems when you send your codebase to Cloud Platform. Cloud Platform can fail when it attempts to send your code with large files to its web servers.

   Move these files and directories to a /files directory for your application, such as [docroot]/default/files. After you move the files and directories, you can make symlinks to their relative locations on your local server, which will be maintained after you send your application to Cloud Platform. For more information, see Working with files.

8. Clear your Drupal caches.

9. Make a full back up of your application and store this copy in a safe place. Verify that you can revert to your backup copy.