Site Factory

Known issues

This page describes any known issues with Site Factory.

If you encounter any difficulties with your Site Factory subscription, contact Acquia Support for assistance.

Known compatibility issues

On-demand environments are not available for Site Factory.

On-demand environments are incompatible with Site Factory’s code workflow.

Live Development is not available for Site Factory

The Live Development mode of Cloud Platform bypasses features necessary for Site Factory code updates, and can cause serious issues which are difficult to troubleshoot.

Drush 9 or later requires the 2.x version of the Site Factory Connector

To use Drush 9 or later with your Site Factory websites, you must use the 2.x version of the Site Factory Connector module.

Drush 8.1.16 requires Site Factory Connector version 1.44 or later

To use Drush 8.1.16 or later with your websites, you must use version 1.44 or later of the Site Factory Connector module for your version of Drupal.

Default file system path for newly created sites is changed when Drush is updated to version 9 or 10

The default file system paths will no longer be correct for a newly created site after updating to Drush version 9 or 10.

Workaround: See Acquia knowledge base article.

Drush 12 is incompatible with Site Factory v2.169 and earlier

Drush 12 does not currently work on Site Factory.

Workaround: Use Drush 11 until Site Factory v2.170 is released.

Error while creating a Drupal site

When attempting to create a new Drupal site, you might encounter an error message related to the writability of the settings file. The error message appears in the WIP logs and states:

Settings file: The Settings file is not writable.
The Drupal installer requires write permissions to ./sites/g/settings.php during the installation process.
The webhosting issues documentation section offers help on this and other topics.

This error usually occurs due to customizations within the codebase. One potential cause can be misconfiguration of installation profiles.

For more information on managing preferences and profiles, see the following documentation:

Known issues with the Site Factory Management Console

Concurrent website deletions cause websites to remain in a site collection

When users delete several websites at the same time, the websites are deleted from the platform, but remain visible in the Site Factory Management Console.

Workaround: Subscribers must create a Support ticket to request manual deletion of the websites.

The website management console displays fields with incorrect data

The Users and Posts fields in the table display of the Site Factory Management Console don’t display correct data, and will be removed in an upcoming Site Factory release.

Incorrect concurrency values are displayed for task logs

The Task log webpage displays incorrect values for Concurrency when users attempt to view detailed task information.

The Export Site feature is visible but unavailable

The Export site feature from the Gardens distribution is still visible in the Site actions and organization menu for certain websites.

Known issues with version control and deployments

The Site Factory Connector module must be enabled

Several features of the Site Factory Management Console will fail if the Site Factory Connector module is either disabled or not included in the codebase.

The acsf-init command must be executed when updating your codebase

Several features of the Site Factory Management Console will fail if the acsf-init command isn’t executed before pushing changes (including upgrading the Site Factory Connector module) to your Acquia version control repository. For more information, see Updating with the acsf-init command.

Update the provided code distribution before beginning development

The code distribution provided when a new Site Factory account is provisioned should be replaced with the distribution of your choice before development begins.

Unicode characters and emoji are not supported in branch names

If a branch name contains a Unicode character, such as an emoji, Site Factory will display a Failure due to fatal system error message when users attempt to switch to that branch. This error affects all Cloud Platform-related products.

Known issues with path-based domains

Path-based domains display incorrectly during code deployments

When you transfer domains to a secondary environment of a production deployment, path-based domains (such as example.com/site1) may not simultaneously receive code and database updates. If the deployment contains changes requiring a cache clear or database updates, path-based domains can display outdated content, improperly formatted content, or HTTP error messages until Site Factory completes applying the updates to all affected websites.

Non-Drupal code fails to bootstrap path-based domains

PHP scripts provided by modules that use Drupal’s bootstrap process cannot locate a website when using path-based domains.

Adding a path-based domain completes with an error message

Adding path-based domains to a website will succeed, but the domain name server (DNS) lookup failure will display an error.

Known issues with custom code and hooks

Custom VCLs are not supported on Site Factory

Site Factory does not support custom Varnish® configurations.

Drush cache clears can cause deployment failures

When drush cache clear is included in a db-update hook in Site Factory, multiple website deployments fail due to race conditions.

Workaround: Use the master branch of Drush. In the db-update hook, export the following environment variable, which forces Drush to move its cache directory into a site-specific directory:

export DRUSH_PATHS_CACHE_DIRECTORY=/tmp/.drush/${db_role}

Known issues with local development

Customizations to php.ini unavailable to command-line applications

Unlike other Cloud Platform-hosted websites, Site Factory does not allow you to bypass the inclusion of your environment’s php.ini by clearing the PHPRC environment variable.

Website duplication may cause rsync issues

Website duplication can cause rsync issues in the distributed file system which results in the following task log error:

file has vanished: "/mnt/files/[env]/sites/g/files/path/to/files/"
rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred (code 24)at main.c(1183) [sender=3.1.1]
Could not rsync from [error]

Workaround: Contact Acquia Support and specify the affected files listed in the rsync error.

Other known issues with Site Factory

Databases remain for sites after install failed

Databases may remain for sites where site install failed and be visible when using Acquia CLI.

Contact Acquia Support if you need these databases deleted.

Databases remain on non-production environments after wiping

Databases for websites created on a non-production environment are emptied but not deleted when staging websites and selecting the Wipe target environment checkbox.

Non-Latin characters are not supported in filenames

Site Factory doesn’t support non-latin characters in filenames for the files that are committed to external themes. This applies to the backup feature as well.