With Site Factory, you can centrally manage websites using the same codebase and region—but what if some of your websites are fundamentally different from the rest?

If you have discrete groups of websites sharing a set of basic, fundamental differences between the groups, you can use stacks to manage your websites in a single Site Factory subscription. Stacks use the same codebase on the same managed, dedicated infrastructure for a group of websites. Stacks can be helpful in the following situations:

• Different Drupal core: You may have some websites based on Drupal 9 or later, and others remaining on Drupal 7.

• Different installed modules: You may have websites with fundamentally different business purposes, and each set of websites needs a different set of custom and contributed Drupal modules.

Stacks in Site Factory enable you to develop and maintain each group separately while still managing the websites in the same subscription and Site Factory Management Console. Stacks provide you with much more flexibility, along with unified governance, assembly, and delivery.

Getting started with stacks

Each Site Factory subscription starts with a single stack. To add more stacks, contact your Acquia Account Manager. There is an additional cost for each stack.

Acquia will provision your new stack, and then let you know when the stack is ready for you to begin development.

Your first stack will be named Stack 1, with any subsequent stacks named in numeric order: Stack 2, Stack 3, and so forth. Although you cannot rename a stack, you can contact Acquia Support to request Acquia add a description to an existing stack.

Websites managed as part of a stack share the same default subdomain pattern, such as *.customer.acsitefactory.com. The unique subdomain pattern may change if different load balancers are utilized by newly added stacks. New stacks must always be provisioned in the same region as your initial stack. To create Site Factory sites in an alternate region, contact your Acquia Account Manager for creating a new Site Factory application. Site Factory doesn’t support Multi-Region Failover.

Viewing your repository information

After Acquia provisions your stack, you can sign in to the Cloud Platform interface to prepare for developing websites on your new stack.

1. Sign in to the Cloud Platform interface as a user with platform admin permissions.

2. Select your application.

3. Click Actions > View Git Information to display code repository information for your stack.

Working with stacks

After adding additional stacks, you will still manage all of your Site Factory websites using the same Site Factory Management Console, regardless of which stack they belong to. When you perform many actions in the Site Factory Management Console, you will select which stack you want to work on. For example, you can perform the following actions on a per-stack basis:

• Creating sites and site groups

• Managing cron tasks using the management console

• Managing subscription usage

• Performing a production deployment

When copying website data to non-production environments, selecting the Wipe target environment checkbox will wipe all stacks on the target environment.

Identify the stack for a website

If you have more than one Site Factory stack, you can identify what stack a website belongs to by performing the following steps:

1. Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console as a user with the platform admin or site builder role.

2. Click Sites.

3. Scroll to or filter for the website with the stack that you want to identify.

4. Point to the Information icon to display a tooltip that contains the stack information.

   

Updating stack labels

You can update stack labels in Site Factory through the Stack Management setting on the Administration tab.

1. Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console.

2. In the top menu, click Administration.

3. Click the Stack Management link to access stack labels.

   

4. Edit the stack name and description.

5. Click Save.

Using Site Factory Stacks