Important
End of Support notice! Acquia has stopped support for Dev Desktop on June 30, 2021. Acquia recommends that you transition to Acquia Cloud IDE for a managed development environment on Cloud Platform. For more information, see Migrating from Dev Desktop to Cloud IDE.
Acquia also provides limited integration with open source alternatives to Cloud IDE for local development. For more information, see Local development solutions.
Using Acquia Dev Desktop, you can make changes to your local Drupal website, and then push your changes to your website on Acquia Cloud, as described in Working with sites on Acquia Cloud. This topic describes the process in more detail.
When you use Acquia Dev Desktop to push code to Acquia Cloud, a dialog appears so you can review all your uncommitted changes. You can optionally provide a commit message, and choose to ignore any of your local changes. When you are ready, click Commit and your changes will be committed. The title of the Review uncommitted changes dialog shows the Git branch you are committing to, and the dialog lists all of the directories and files in your local codebase that differ from your Acquia Cloud repository. Remember that your Acquia Cloud site has a single code repository which is shared by each of your environments. Each environment can have a different tag or branch deployed. You can’t push local code changes if you have a tag deployed in Acquia Cloud.
For each directory or file, the Review uncommitted changes dialog displays:
The action that will be taken when you click Commit. You can change this action to
Always ignoreorSkip for nowby selecting the item and clicking Action. For more information, see Omitting files from code pushes.The local file or directory’s Git status, which indicates the differences between your local copy and what is in your Acquia Cloud repository. Click on a row to view an explanation of the status. For more information, see Git status codes.
The path of the file or directory within your application.
Before you click Commit, you can add a Commit message to identify
the changes you are pushing. This is optional, but recommended. Click
Commit to push all the changed files from your local codebase to
your Acquia Cloud repository. This pushes all files listed whose
action is marked Commit.
Acquia Dev Desktop can only push code changes when the Acquia Cloud environment and your local code repository have the same branch (and not a tag) deployed. For more information, see Branch differences between Acquia Cloud and your local code repository.
When you sync your code, you may need to resolve merge conflicts in your codebase. This is likely to happen if you have more than one developer working in the same codebase, or if you are working both in Acquia Dev Desktop and in Acquia Cloud Live Development mode. For information about resolving merge conflicts, see Resources for learning Git and Git Immersion.
Omitting files from code pushes
If you have changed files in your codebase that you do not want to push to your Acquia Cloud repository, you can select those files, click Action, and select Skip for now if you don’t want to push them now, but might in the future.
If you have added files in your local codebase and you know that you will never want to push them to your Acquia Cloud repository, you can select those files, click Action, and select Always ignore. The next time you use Acquia Dev Desktop to push code to your Acquia Cloud repository, those selected files will be ignored and will not appear in the list of changed files.
Then click Commit to make the changes to your Acquia Cloud repository.
Note
For information on managing and moving your code between your Acquia Cloud environments, see Working with code.
Git status codes
The status code displayed for each file shows you information about the state of the file in your local codebase, compared to the state of the file in your Acquia Cloud repository.