Using Live Development mode to change code on your server¶

Using Live Development to edit code on your server¶

After you enable Live Development for an environment, you can then sign in to your environment with SSH and directly edit code. You can also either upload code with Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), rsync, or configure an IDE on your local machine to upload code directly to your Cloud Platform server. When ready, you can commit changes in your Live Development directory to Git.

Your application’s code repository is located on the environment at ~/[env]/livedev. In the Dev environment, that would be ~/dev/livedev and in the Staging environment, that would be ~/test/livedev. When you enable Live Development, the currently-deployed branch of your Git repository is copied to this directory. Use the code editor of your choice to make changes to your files. You should see your changes in the environment you are working in.

When you are done making changes, remember to commit and push your changes to your Git repository. For information about committing changes, see Live Development workflow and Sending updates to your code repository.

If you enable Live Development for an environment, you cannot complete the following tasks:

• Deploy code to or from that environment using a drag-and-drop operation in the Cloud Platform interface.
• Install a new Drupal distribution in that environment in the Cloud Platform interface.
• Import an existing application in that environment in the Cloud Platform interface.

Disable Live Development to restore the ability to take these actions.

Enabling Live Development can result in unexpected behavior if enabled for an application also using Cloud Hooks. For more information, see Cloud Hooks and Live Development.

Enabling Live Development on an environment can slow the response times of your Drupal application. Live Development uses the Cloud Platform user interface file system to ensure your code is reachable from all web servers. Since a network file system is not well-suited for code execution, the performance of your application may be adversely impacted while using Live Development. Acquia recommends you disable Live Development when you are finished with your changes.

Enabling Live Development¶

To enable Live Development on a non-production environment:

1. Sign in to Cloud Platform as a user with the Pull and deploy code, files, or databases permission.
2. From the Overview page of a non-production environment, click Live Development.
3. A dialog box will open to confirm you want to enable live development. Click Enable.
4. Wait for the activity log to indicate the task is complete.

You can enable Live Development for your Development or Staging environments, but not for your Production environment.

If you have a Cloud Platform Free subscription, your codebase has a limited amount of disk storage available. When you enable Live Development, Cloud Platform creates a copy of your codebase. If your codebase is already using a large portion of your codebase disk quota, then enabling Live Development may fail. For more information, see Managing disk storage for Cloud Platform Free applications.

Disabling Live Development¶

You can disable Live Development at any time. When you disable Live Development, Cloud Platform deploys whatever branch the environment was set to deploy before you enabled Live Development for it. Therefore, you must commit and push all changes on your Live Development directory (~/[env]/livedev), or discard them.

To disable Live Development, complete the following steps:

1. From the Overview page of a non-production environment, click Live Development.
2. A dialog box will open to confirm you want to disable live development. If you have uncommitted changes you do not want to keep, select the check box for Discard all uncommitted or unpushed changes in the dialog box.
3. Click Disable.
4. Wait for the activity log to indicate the task is complete.

Related topics¶

• Working with code
• Using your code repository