Important
EOL notice! The Lightning Profile will reach end-of-life on November, 2021. For more information, see Frequently Asked Questions.
Acquia Lightning is a packaged distribution of the open source Drupal social publishing system for Drupal 8. As a free collection of useful modules from Acquia and the Drupal community, Acquia Lightning offers you a quick on-ramp to begin building your website.
In Drupal 8, we have taken advantage of new Drupal features, and added functions enhancing the new standard for enterprise authoring in Drupal, including layout, preview, workflow, and media. We have embedded hundreds of automated tests, allowing developers to create continuous integration pipelines to monitor major features, providing a safe environment to innovate with their own custom code additions to Acquia Lightning.
Although large numbers of other Drupal installations and distributions rely on Drush for updates and development, Acquia Lightning requires the use of Composer commands with your installation.
Unlike Drush, Composer is a dependency manager system you can use to prevent module mismatches and better ensure system reliability. As an example, if the Module A version 8.x-1.0 depends on Module B version 8.x-3.2, Composer will not let you update Module B to version 3.3 or downgrade Module B to version 3.1.
The following table includes Composer command replacements for the Drush commands you may already know:
| Task | Drush (version <= 8 only) | Composer |
|---|---|---|
| Fetch the latest version of a project | drush pm-download [project] |
composer require drupal/[project]:8.* |
| Fetch a specific version of a project | drush pm-download [project]-8.x-1.0-beta3 |
composer require drupal/[project]:8.1.0-beta3 |
| Update all projects and Drupal core | drush pm-update |
composer update |
| Update a single project | drush pm-update [project] |
composer update drupal/[project] |
| Updating Drupal core | drush pm-update drupal |
composer update drupal/core |
Drush remains in use as the module handles certain tasks, such as database
updates (drush updatedb). The installer will install a copy of Drush
(local to the project) in the bin directory.
If you review the .gitignore file provided in the distribution, you will
see source control exclude certain directories, including all directories
containing contributed projects. The exclusion can be disconcerting if
you are familiar with Drush, but in a Composer-based project, you must
not commit your installed dependencies to source control.
When you configure the project, Composer will create a file called
composer.lock, listing installed dependencies and versions. Commit
the composer.lock file to source control. When others want
to install copies of the project, they must run composer install,
which will install the correct versions of everything listed in
composer.lock. The composer install command ensures a consistent
base development environment for all team members.
As you install or upgrade to Acquia Lightning, use the information as a guide to connect your website to an Acquia subscription to acquaint yourself with Acquia Support, and network services.
Committing settings.php to your repository
Drupal websites use a settings.php file for basic configuration.
Applications on Cloud Platform have a special include statement configuring your settings.php
file to function properly in all environments hosted on
Cloud Platform. Unless building a distribution or deploying
to a large number of environments with different databases, Acquia
recommends you commit the settings.php file to your repository.
For an example of how to install a require line in settings.php to
protect sensitive credentials becoming stored in version control, see the
blt.settings.php
file in Acquia BLT.
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