Extending Acquia Cloud Site Factory¶
As with any large website development effort, one of the most important tasks is to be able to scale your organization’s efforts without having to increase the number of people on your development team. To help you accomplish this goal, Acquia Cloud Site Factory supports the use of internal and external tools that can allow you to automate many common development and management requirements.
For example, you can leverage the advanced API and hook systems included with Acquia Cloud Site Factory and the command-line power of Drush to simplify and streamline your development processes. You can then extend your team’s efforts by using the Acquia BLT toolkit and Lightning distribution, which enable you to scale your website development efforts without scaling your development team.
Advanced features of Acquia Cloud Site Factory¶
Along with the Site Factory Management Console, Acquia Cloud Site Factory provides additional tools for users who want to leverage the power of command-line scripting to further customize their platform to meet their needs. The following tools are available for your use:
- Acquia Cloud Site Factory REST API - Create and manage websites on your platform, trigger and monitor scheduled jobs, create backups, and clear caches on any website hosted on your platform.
- Acquia Cloud Site Factory hooks – Simplify code deployments, and trigger the execution of custom code at multiple points during website installation, deployment, and runtime.
- Drush – Perform administrative and application maintenance tasks from the command line, instead of having to use the Drupal administrative interface.
External Acquia-supported tools¶
In addition to the tools included with Acquia Cloud Site Factory, the following Acquia-supported products are designed to speed up and standardize development at scale:
- Acquia BLT – Provides additional continuous integration (CI) support, easier website creation with installation profiles, multisite-aware Drush aliases, simplified local development environment setup, and support for automated tests for code regressions.
- Lightning – Provides a packaged distribution of Drupal with many commonly-used modules included and configured to reduce repetitive development tasks. This is the default Drupal distribution used by Acquia Cloud Site Factory-hosted websites if another custom distribution is not supplied for use.
Unofficial community-supported tools¶
There are also several community-sponsored toolkits that Acquia Cloud Site Factory users have found useful or helpful when working with their websites, including the following:
Note
Although Acquia cannot provide the same level of support for these community projects as we do our own products, they are included on this page because we are aware that many of our customers have found the following tools to be helpful.
- acsf-tools toolkit – Provides a set of Drush scripts that are tuned both for multisite management and Acquia Cloud Site Factory concepts.
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