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Installing Acquia Purge

Caching content on your website is an important step towards improving your website’s performance. Identifying and purging content changes translates to improved timeliness of content for site visitors while maximizing the sites’ response times and ability to scale. The Acquia Purge module was designed from the ground up to automate the management of updating content in Cloud Platform, and therefore ideally a Varnish-cached, website.

With this module, you can purge all load balancers on Cloud Platform.

Important

Acquia recommends that you test your website with Acquia Purge on a clone or copy of your Drupal website in a test server environment before you upgrade your production server.

Installing Acquia Purge

Drupal 9 or later
Drupal 7

  1. Add Purge and Acquia Purge modules to your codebase. You should always use the latest available release. Enable the following modules:

    • purge
    • purge_ui
    • purge_drush
    • purge_queuer_coretags
    • purge_processor_cron
    • purge_processor_lateruntime
    • acquia_purge

  2. To increase your TTL or max-age to 1 month:

    1. Navigate to /admin/config/development/performance.
    2. In the Page cache maximum age drop-down menu, select 1 month in the Caching section.

    Alternatively, you can use Drush as follows:

    $ drush @site.env config-set -y system.performance cache.page.max_age 2764800

  3. Navigate to /admin/config/development/performance/purge, and click the Add purger option in the Cache invalidation section.

    Note

    If you do not see the Add purger option, rebuild caches.

    The system displays a pop-up window to confirm the purger that you want to add. By default, Cloud Platform is selected.

    1. Click Add. After the purger is added, a green tick appears in the TAG column.

    Alternatively, you can use Drush to add the purger:

    $ drush p-purger-add --if-not-exists acquia_purge

The purger is created.

  4. To confirm that your setup is complete, access /admin/config/development/performance/purge, or run drush purge-diagnostics. If all checks return OK, you’re all set.

    drush @site.env p-diagnostics

    Acquia Purge diagnostics

The following procedure is based on Acquia Purge 7.x-1.3.

  1. Ensure that the site does not have any of the following incompatible modules enabled. Disable and then uninstall them if they are enabled:

    For more information about these modules and other modules that have issues with Cloud Platform, see Modules and applications incompatible with Cloud Platform.

  2. Check out a local copy of your code and work from there. Add the Cache Expiration and Acquia Purge modules to your site by using the following Drush command or your preferred method. The Cache Expiration module tracks what needs to be purged.

    drush dl expire acquia_purge

    For information about installing and enabling modules, see Installing modules and themes.

  3. After you install the module, update your code repository.

  4. Enable both modules, either on the Module page or with the following Drush command:

    drush en expire acquia_purge

    The Acquia Purge module gives editor roles a visually indicative progress bar upon saving content, using the Purge on-screen permission. This is what the progress bar will look like:

    Acquia Purge

  5. Visit the Status report page at Admin > Reports > Status report, or run drush ap-diagnosis in your site’s Unix shell. This causes Acquia Purge to perform diagnostic tests and flag known configuration issues.

If the status report doesn’t flag any potential issues, you have successfully installed Acquia Purge. Flagged issues should point to documentation to help correct those issues. Acquia Purge is now idle and waiting for changes within your site that need to be purged from the Cloud Platform load balancers.

Next step

Although Acquia Purge is in use on your site, it’s not yet configured for optimal results. For information about how you can optimize Acquia Purge for your site, see:

Module questions and comments

If you have any questions or comments about the module for its maintainer, or you’ve found a bug or some other issue, you can file an issue in the issue queue.

53 State Street, 10th Floor
Boston, MA 02109
United States
Phone: 888-922-7842