Live Development is a feature that enables you to update code on your Cloud Platform Dev and Stage environments directly, without needing to first make the changes locally, and then commit them using a version control system (VCS).
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:
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.
To enable Live Development on a non-production environment:
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.
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: