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.
Dev Desktop is incompatible with environments running on the Cloud Next infrastructure.
Acquia Dev Desktop provides the quickest way to configure and run Drupal for local development on your Mac or Windows PC. Acquia Dev Desktop is an xAMP stack (or DAMP stack) installer, providing a full Drupal-specific stack that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Also, because of its integration with Cloud Platform, Acquia Dev Desktop provides the easiest method to publish, develop, and synchronize your local Drupal websites onto the web.
Components
Along with the main application to help you with local Drupal website development, Acquia Dev Desktop includes the following stack components:
Component | Description |
|---|---|
Apache HTTP Server | The world’s most popular web server. |
MySQL Database Server | Percona Server, an enhanced version of MySQL, the world’s most popular database server with better performance, scalability, tunability, and instrumentation. |
PHP | The language powering Drupal. |
Drush | A command-line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. |
phpMyAdmin | A popular in-browser database management tool. |
XMail Server (Windows only) | Allows your locally installed website to send emails directly, which is important for password reset, testing, and other features (macOS includes this built-in feature). |
Installing and using Acquia Dev Desktop
To start using Acquia Dev Desktop, see the following documentation resources:
For more information about updates and resolving issues with Acquia Dev Desktop, see Release notes - Acquia Dev Desktop and Known issues in Acquia Dev Desktop.