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, 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 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 BLT toolkit, which enables you to scale your website development efforts without scaling your development team.
Along with the Site Factory Management Console, 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:
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.
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.
In addition to the tools included with Site Factory, the following Acquia-supported product is designed to speed up and standardize development at scale:
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.
Several community-sponsored tool kits are available that 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 Site Factory concepts.