Installing Acquia Purge for Drupal 7.x

This article is based on Acquia Purge 7.x-1.3. For Drupal 8 sites, see Drupal 8 Acquia Purge & cache tags invalidation. 

The Acquia Purge module is the fastest and most convenient way to purge caches. It provides a non-programmatic way to purge Varnish-powered load balancers using a UI, and it integrates the Rules and Cache Expiration modules for extra flexibility and proactive purging.

Caching content on your website is an important step towards improving your website's performance. Identifying and purging content changes translates to improved timeliness of content for site visitors while maximizing the sites' response times and ability to scale. The Acquia Purge module was designed from the ground up to be an extremely simple way to automate the management of updating content in an Acquia Cloud, and therefore ideally a Varnish-cached, website.

The module provides the ability to purge all load balancers on Acquia Cloud and focuses on doing that well, while the Cache Expiration module remains responsible for tracking what needs to be purged.

Important

We strongly recommend that you test your website with Acquia Purge on a clone or copy of your Drupal website in a test server environment before you upgrade your production server.

To install the module on your site, complete the following steps:

1. Ensure that the site does not have any of the following incompatible modules enabled. Disable and then uninstall them if they are enabled:
   • Purge
   • Varnish
   • Boost

   For more information about these modules and other modules that have issues with Acquia Cloud, see Module incompatibilities with Acquia Cloud.

2. Check out a local copy of your code and work from there. Add the Cache Expiration and Acquia Purge modules to your site by using the following Drush command or your preferred method.
   copy

   drush dl expire acquia_purge

   For information about installing and enabling modules, see Installing modules and themes on drupal.org.

3. After you install the module, update your code repository.
4. Enable both modules, either on the Module page or with the following Drush command:
   copy

   drush en expire acquia_purge

5. The Acquia Purge module gives editor roles a visually indicative progress bar upon saving content, using the Purge on-screen permission.

   This is what the progress bar will look like:

6. Either visit the Status report page at Admin > Reports > Status report or run drush ap-diagnosis in your site's Unix shell. This causes Acquia Purge to perform diagnostic tests and flag known configuration issues.

If the Status Report doesn't flag any potential issues, you have successfully installed Acquia Purge. Flagged issues should point to documentation to help correct those issues. Acquia Purge is now idle and waiting for changes within your site that need to be purged from the Acquia Cloud load balancers.

Next step

Although Acquia Purge is now in use on your site, it's not yet been configured for optimal results. For information about how you can optimize Acquia Purge for your site, see Configuring Acquia Purge.

Module questions and comments

If you have any questions or comments about the module for its maintainer, or you've found a bug or some other issue, you can file an issue in the Acquia Purge issue queue.