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.
Acquia Dev Desktop includes Drush, a command-line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. Drush includes tools for many Drupal development and management tasks. If you are accustomed to working from the command line, you may find that working with Drush is faster and easier than using the Drupal admin user interface.
Using Drush with local sites
For example, there are Drush commands to download, enable, and update contributed modules or themes from Drupal.org. If you wanted to use a module with your local website (in this case, the Pathauto module), use the following procedure:
In Acquia Dev Desktop, in the website list, click your local website.
To the right of the Local code field for your website, click its Drush console button.
Enter one of the following Drush commands based on your needs:
Download: Obtains the latest recommended version of the module, downloads it, and unzips it into your website’s
modulesdirectorydrush dl pathautoEnable: Enables the downloaded module for your website
drush en pathautoUpdate: Similar to download, obtains the latest recommended version of the previously downloaded module, and also runs any required database updates
drush up pathauto
Using Drush with Acquia-hosted sites
Similarly, you can use Drush on an Cloud Platform website. To open a console window for your Drush commands:
In Acquia Dev Desktop, in the website list, click your Cloud Platform website.
To the right of the SSH address for your website, click its Drush console button.
On Cloud Platform, you can use Drush Cloud API commands, which provide a rich set of tools to extend, enhance, and customize your Cloud Platform website. For more information, see Developing with the Cloud Platform API.