Acquia provides Remote Administration (RA) clients with an additional RA environment at no added cost. This environment facilitates the deployment and testing of security updates without disrupting ongoing development in other environments. Updates are deployed based on your Preferences.

For Acquia Cloud Enterprise subscribers, the RA environment is hosted on RA-specific shared Acquia servers and will have no impact on development, staging, or production servers during step one of the update process. RA environments for Acquia Cloud Professional subscribers are configured to consume no critical system resources while the website sits idle, and all critical resources remain available to the production website.

Security update testing

Subscriber testing of the initial step (see Implementing security updates) takes place on the RA environment. Subscribers and Acquia Support can push code to the deployed branch for testing. Testing must take into account that the RA environment may not be configured with the same specifications as your Development, Stage, or Production environments. This environment will be overwritten by new security updates, and must not be used for any ongoing development, testing, or content creation. It’s not possible to deploy code to this environment using the workflow interface.

Databases

Databases copied to the RA environment will only remain as long as a security update branch is deployed and undergoes testing.

You can use Cloud Hooks to scrub your databases to prevent sensitive data from being copied into the RA environment. For more information about using Cloud Hooks, see Automating with Cloud Hooks.

Automated database changes

To ensure compatibility and testability in the RA environment, certain changes are made to the copied database using drush. Database level changes on the RA environment, such as creating new content or disabling modules, have no effect on the code or data deployed to any other environment. The update workflow never copies an RA environment into either the testing or production environments.

If the updated website uses modules dependent upon modules modified by automation, full testing of the features must take place on another environment. In such cases, the branch can either be deployed to another environment upon request, or the features can be tested when the branch has been tagged (step two).

• Secure Pages and Secure Login: These modules are most often coded to point to the Production website, so leaving them enabled often confuses testing. As a result, these modules are disabled using drush when an update branch is deployed to RA. You must test modules dependent on Secure Pages and Secure Login on another environment.
• Stage File Proxy: This module is added and enabled. See the following information for details.

Subscription-specific database changes

In situations where specific modules must be restricted or disabled on the RA environment, Acquia recommends taking advantage of environment-level variables in the settings.php file that can control features for each environment. It’s possible to set either an environment-specific feature using the AH_SITE_ENVIRONMENT variable or to restrict changes to the non-production environment feature by using AH_NON_PRODUCTION. These variables can be used to redirect secure pages for each environment, or to set Acquia Search to read-only on the RA environment.

Given the unique needs of each website, the subscriber must set these variables. If needed, Acquia Support can offer suggestions and examples.

Installations using the Devinci module must configure that module to include an RA environment, or Drush updates will fail.

Deploy hooks

Hooks in the common directory (typically hooks) will run on all environments, including RA. Due to differences between the RA environment and the other environments, these hook scripts can result in unexpected behaviors or task failures, which can cause the RA automated update process to fail.

If you have scripts in the common directory, you can modify them slightly to prevent them from running on the RA environment. The following example includes an if statement to include in the scripts allowing them to run as expected on all environments except for RA:

#!/bin/sh
#
#Standard hook variables here
#
site="$1"
target_env="$2"

if [ "$target_env" != "ra" ]; then
     drush @$site.$target_env updatedb --yes
fi

Alternately, move any hooks located in the common directory to the development, stage, and / or production directories instead.

Files and the Stage File Proxy module

Production files are not copied into the RA environment. Instead, the Stage File Proxy module is implemented. The module is added to the repository and enabled on the RA environment only. It has no effect on production environments. This module sends file requests to the production environment and copies the production file in the RA environment. This saves both time and space. Files uploaded by other means, or theme images or CSS using the Drupal file structure rather than a theme folder, won’t display in the RA environment.

Stage File Proxy is incompatible with the following modules:

• FileField Sources

• Fast 404: Adding the following code to your website’s settings.php file will ensure Fast 404 doesn’t interfere with the features of Stage File Proxy:

  copy

  if (!isset($_ENV['AH_SITE_ENVIRONMENT']) || $_ENV['AH_SITE_ENVIRONMENT'] != "ra") fast_404_ext_check();

Stage File Proxy doesn’t support subfolders within your Drupal user files directory. Any images or other files within subfolders won’t be displayed as expected in the RA environment.

If you are running these modules, you must deploy the security update to a different testing environment as soon as it’s available.

Memcache disabled

Memcache is not enabled in the RA environment. It may be enabled in your other environments, but should result in minimal impact to your website(s) when testing in the RA environment. The recommended memcache include statement must already be present in your settings.php file. Select the configuration appropriate for your version of Drupal:

For recommended settings for the current Drupal version, see Enabling Memcached on Cloud Platform.

If you are using a different include statement related to memcache in your settings.php files, Acquia strongly recommends replacing it with the previous statement and deploying to your production environment. After the change is deployed to production, websites deployed to the RA environment during step one of the update process will no longer be dependent on memcache while running on that environment.

Domains

The RA environment is provisioned with a single Cloud Platform subdomain like your Development, Stage, and Production environments. Other domains can be added to the RA environment from the Cloud Platform Domains page. Instructions for adding domains are available at Managing domains.

Your DNS provider must point your domain names to the IP address of the RA environment ensuring requests for that domain name are directed to the correct location on the RA servers. You can add the domain names to your local hosts file to test locally.

Authentication issues

Subscribers using a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution for Drupal user authentication may encounter issues when signing in to websites on their RA environment that haven’t been configured with the SSO. Websites using LDAP, SAML, or SimpleSAML solutions can also encounter the same issue.

If authentication issues delay your testing in the RA environment, deploy the update branch to the preferred Testing environment as set in Preferences. When creating your update ticket, be sure to request the deployment of update code to an environment other than RA. The RA Team will deploy the update branch to your preferred environment and will tell you when you can continue testing.

Environment

#!/bin/sh
#
#Standard hook variables here
#
site="$1"
target_env="$2"

if [ "$target_env" != "ra" ]; then
     drush @$site.$target_env updatedb --yes
fi