Important
EOL notice! Drupal 8 reached end-of-life on November 2, 2021. For more information, see Frequently Asked Questions.
One of the most common tasks you’ll accomplish while developing or maintaining
a Drupal application is adding a Drupal contributed module. If you are used to
working in a local installation of Drupal, you may be used to doing this
directly in the Drupal admin interface, using the core Update Manager module,
or perhaps with Drush, using the drush dl
command. If your application is
hosted on Cloud Platform, the module directories are part of the code
repository, which is not directly writable. This means that you can’t directly
add a module using the Update Manager, drush dl
, or
SFTP. Instead, you must commit your
changes using a version control system (Git).
There are several different approaches you can take. This topic describes two of them:
To add a module to your local code base, and then commit it:
Get SSH access to your Cloud Platform infrastructure, if you don’t already have it.
Install Git locally, if you haven’t already done so.
Change directory into the new local copy of the repository.
Create a feature branch to test the module. In this example, we’ll assume
that we’re installing the Foo module, so we’ll call the feature branch
foo
.
git checkout -b foo
Change directory into your modules directory using one of the following locations:
/modules
or /modules/contrib
/sites/all/modules
or
/sites/all/modules/contrib
Download and add the contributed module to the modules directory in the feature branch. For example:
curl http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/foo.tar.gz | tar fz
Commit the new module code into the Cloud Platform repository.
Deploy the feature branch to your Development or Staging environment for testing.
Using the Drupal admin UI or Drush, enable and configure the new module.
Note
Live Development mode is not available for environments running on Acquia Cloud Next technologies.
Using Live Development mode, you can temporarily make the docroot of your Development environment writable, so you can add modules or make other changes.
Here are the steps for installing a module on a Cloud Platform environment using Live Development, and then committing it. It’s important that you commit your changes to your Cloud Platform code repository before you disable Live Development. Otherwise, the new module won’t be part of your application’s code base. If your application’s database thinks the new module is enabled, but it can’t be found, this can cause havoc.
/admin/modules
page./admin/modules
page, click Install new module and use the
Update Manager to install the module./mnt/gfs/[sitename].[env]/livedev
.