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.
This page describes how to create a new Drupal website, starting from an existing website on your local computer.
If you already have a Drupal website you’ve been working on locally, you can import the website into Acquia Dev Desktop. You can also follow the following procedure:
If you want to start with a Drupal distribution that isn’t included with Acquia Dev Desktop, then you must first download the Drupal distribution to your computer.
If you have an existing Drupal website not hosted by Cloud Platform, then you must first export your Drupal website to your computer.
If you are starting from a Drupal distribution or a Drupal website archive exported from another hosting environment, extract the website archive before you import the website into Acquia Dev Desktop.
Importing an existing website
To import an existing website into Acquia Dev Desktop:
If the Welcome to Acquia Dev Desktop dialog box displays (as described in Getting started with Acquia Dev Desktop), click Start with an existing Drupal site located on my computer and continue to Step 2. If the Acquia Dev Desktop 2 dialog box displays, click the
+button, and then continue to Step 2.In the Import local Drupal site dialog box, enter the following information:
Local codebase folder: Enter the local folder that has your Drupal codebase (your local website’s docroot)
Local site name: Enter a name for your local website. The local website URL will be based on this name, so it can only use characters valid for a URL.
Use PHP: Select a PHP version to use. Although you can accept the default PHP version, be aware that some Drupal distributions or modules may require specific PHP versions.
Database: Specify how to set up the database for your Drupal website. If you’re starting from scratch, select Create a new database. If you have content in your existing website’s database you want to import into Acquia Dev Desktop, import the existing website’s database, as described in Importing a database.
New database name: Enter a name for your Drupal website’s database. Typically, you can accept the default value, which will match the local website name you chose.
Click OK.