What RA does¶

With RA enabled, Acquia takes responsibility for Drupal security updates in your Site Factory codebase. Acquia creates another environment in your Site Factory installation. When Drupal security updates become necessary, Acquia updates the RA environment with the needed changes. Acquia then notifies you the updates are ready for you to test in the RA environment.

Standard (not Premium) RA is available for Site Factory subscriptions. For information about what’s covered by RA updates, see Understanding the scope of Remote Administration. For details about how RA works, see the Remote Administration documentation. For Site Factory, after the Acquia RA team creates a new branch in your RA environment, your development team is responsible for tagging and deploying branches for more testing, and then deploying the tested tag to production using the Site Factory Management Console.

How to get started with Remote Administration¶

If you think Remote Administration is a good fit for your Site Factory, contact your Acquia Account Manager. If you already have processes in place to manage Drupal security updates, you may not need Remote Administration.

Security update process for Site Factory¶

Operation of your production, stage, and development servers won’t be affected by the Remote Administration automated update process. Step 1 of Acquia’s automated security update process will:

1. Create a branch from the tag or branch deployed to your production environment.

2. Deploy this branch to the RA environment.

3. Enable live development on the RA environment.

4. Copy the production database(s) to the RA environment.

5. Use Drush or Composer to apply all security updates to this branch.

6. Create a ticket to inform your team the security update branch is ready for testing and approval.

Acquia Remote Administration only performs step 1 of the update process for Site Factory subscribers. When an update branch is created and deployed to your RA environment, it’s the responsibility of your team to create a new tag from the update branch and to test the tag on your Dev or Stage environment before deploying the updates tag to production through the Site Factory Management Console.