Resources

Configuring Acquia Dev Desktop

Important

End of Support notice! Acquia has stopped support for Dev Desktop on June 30, 2021. Acquia recommends that you transition to 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.

You can configure Acquia Dev Desktop using the Settings screen.

To open the Settings screen, select Acquia Dev Desktop > Preferences.

The Settings screen has five tabs:

General

On the General tab, you can:

  • Configure how Acquia Dev Desktop behaves when you start and stop the application.

  • Enable verbose mode for logging and progress monitoring text, which can be useful for debugging.

  • Acquia Dev Desktop optionally tracks diagnostic and usage data. Clear this setting to opt out of sending Acquia data. For more information, see Reporting diagnostic and usage information.

  • Remove local websites cloned from Cloud Platform. This deletes all local websites associated with your Cloud Platform account, including the local copies of all code, databases, and files. It does not remove any local websites that are not associated with Cloud Platform, nor does it affect the websites hosted on Cloud Platform.

    It also removes your Cloud Platform credentials from Acquia Dev Desktop, so you can click Add Acquia Cloud sites and enter credentials for a different Cloud Platform account.

  • Register or generate an SSH key, which is required to sync local websites with Cloud Platform. For more information, see Generating an SSH key with Dev Desktop.

Ports

On the Ports tab, you can change the ports used by the Acquia Dev Desktop Apache server and MySQL server. You can also change the port used for SSH.

Config

On the Config tab, you can:

  • Select the default PHP version for websites you create with Acquia Dev Desktop.

    Note

    Many PHP extensions that are included with PHP 5 versions are not included with PHP 7 because they are not yet available.

  • Select the PHP mode used by PHP on Acquia Dev Desktop, either Apache module (mod_php) or Fast CGI (mod_fcgid). Generally, you should leave this set to the default, mod_fcgid. If you set the PHP mode to Apache module (mod_php), you can’t change the PHP version on a per-website basis, as described in Working with your sites.

  • View and edit the configuration files for the Apache server (apache/conf/httpd.conf), MySQL server (mysql/my.conf), and PHP (php.ini).

  • Drupal 8 applications only: To enable Drush 10 support, select the Use Drush 10 checkbox.

Logs

On the Logs tab you can view the Drupal logs for each of your local websites. You can also see the Apache server access and errors logs, and the MySQL error and slow query logs for Acquia Dev Desktop.

Proxy

If your local machine is behind a proxy, you can connect from Acquia Dev Desktop to Cloud Platform by configuring the Proxy tab.

  1. Select Enable proxy.

  2. Enter the host name and port number of your proxy.

  3. Enter the username and password you use to access your proxy.

  4. Click OK.