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How Acquia Dev Desktop works with Cloud Platform

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 Lando as an open source alternative to Cloud IDE.

Acquia Dev Desktop is integrated with Cloud Platform. You can export websites created in Acquia Dev Desktop into your Cloud Platform subscription or make a local clone of your Cloud Platform websites with a couple of clicks. Then, you can easily sync the local and Cloud Platform versions of your sites, pushing changes up to the cloud and pulling them down to your local version. This page describes what’s happening when you use Acquia Dev Desktop with Cloud Platform sites.

Acquia Dev Desktop does these things for you. You can see a step-by-step log of these actions by clicking More in the progress dialog.

When you host a local site on Cloud Platform

When you use Acquia Dev Desktop to host a local site on Cloud Platform, Acquia Dev Desktop:

Important

The drush archive-dump command is incompatible with Drush 9 and later.

  1. Creates a site archive from your local site, using the drush archive-dump command. If the local site is a Drupal multisite, only the selected multisite is included.

  2. Uploads the archive to Cloud Platform using SFTP.

  3. Connects to your Cloud Platform using SSH and runs drush ah-site-archive-import to import the uploaded archive into your Cloud Platform subscription.

  4. Downloads site code from your code repository to a new application folder (using git clone).

  5. Modifies settings.php in the new local site to connect to the existing database.

  6. Copies files (and the additional multisites, if any) from the old application to the new one.

When you make a local clone of a Cloud Platform site

When you use Acquia Dev Desktop to make a local clone of a Cloud Platform site, Acquia Dev Desktop:

  1. Downloads the site code from your Cloud Platform code repository to a new application folder (using git clone).

  2. If the Cloud Platform site contains multisites, Acquia Dev Desktop asks you which multisite to clone now.

  3. Creates a new local database and modifies the site’s settings.php to connect to the new database.

  4. Imports the database from Cloud Platform. To do so, it connects to the Cloud Platform server using SSH, runs drush sql-dump, downloads the resulting database archive using SFTP, and then imports the downloaded database into the new local database.

  5. Downloads the Cloud Platform site’s files using rsync. The synced folders are: [docroot]/files, [docroot]/sites/all/files, and [docroot]/sites/[selected multisite]/files.

  6. Gets the drush aliases associated with the site, using the Cloud API, and saves them locally to the [user home]/.acquia/DevDesktop/Drush/Aliases directory.

When you push local code to Cloud Platform

  • If you have a tag deployed locally and have no local modifications, Acquia Dev Desktop deploys the same tag on the Cloud Platform environment and finishes the push operation.

  • If you have a tag deployed locally and have made local modifications to the code, Acquia Dev Desktop displays an error. You can’t deploy to a tag.

  • If you have a branch deployed locally and have made local modifications, Acquia Dev Desktop presents you with a list of local modifications and asks what to do with them. See Committing local changes to Acquia Cloud for more information.

  • Acquia Dev Desktop applies the selected changes, pushing changed files to the code repository, and adding any designated files to the ignore list.

When you push a local database to Cloud Platform

When you push a local database to Cloud Platform, Acquia Dev Desktop:

  1. Creates a dump file from the local database using drush sql-dump.

  2. Uploads the database dump to Cloud Platform using SFTP.

  3. Connects to the Cloud Platform site using SSH and runs drush sql-drop to drop the old database.

  4. Imports the uploaded database dump file into the Cloud Platform site’s database.

When you push local files to Cloud Platform

Acquia Dev Desktop uploads the local site’s files to Cloud Platform using rsync. The synced folders are: [docroot]/files, [docroot]/sites/all/files, and [docroot]/sites/[selected multisite]/files.

When you pull code from Cloud Platform

  • If you have a tag deployed locally and it matches what is deployed in the Cloud Platform environment, then Acquia Dev Desktop returns an error.

  • If you have a branch deployed locally and it matches what is deployed in the Cloud Platform environment, then Acquia Dev Desktop updates the local code from the version control system (using git pull ).

  • If the local and Cloud Platform branches (or tags) don’t match and your version control system is Git, then Acquia Dev Desktop switches the local branch to use what’s deployed on the Cloud Platform environment (same as git checkout).

When you pull a database from Cloud Platform

When you pull a database from Cloud Platform, Acquia Dev Desktop:

  1. Connects to Cloud Platform using SSH and creates a remote database dump file by running drush sql-dump.

  2. Downloads the database dump file from Cloud Platform using SFTP.

  3. Runs drush sql-drop to drop the existing local database.

  4. Imports the downloaded dump file into the local database.

When you pull files from Cloud Platform

Acquia Dev Desktop downloads the Cloud Platform site’s files using rsync. The synced folders are: docroot/files, docroot/sites/all/files, and docroot/sites/[selected multisite]/files.

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