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).

Using Live Development to edit code on your infrastructure

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 infrastructure. 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 the infrastructure. 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:

• Sign in to the Cloud Platform user interface as a user with the Pull and deploy code, files, or databases permission.

• From the Overview page of a non-production environment, click Actions and select Enable Live Development.

  The system displays the confirmation dialog box.

• Click Enable.
• 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.

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:

• From the Overview page of a non-production environment, click Actions and select Disable Live Development.

  The system displays the confirmation dialog box.

• To purge all the uncommitted changes, select the Discard all uncommitted or unpushed changes checkbox.
• Click Disable.
• Wait for the activity log to indicate the task is complete.

Related topics

• Working with code
• Using your code repository

Using the Live Development mode