Acquia Cloud Site Factory uses installation profiles to define base features for your platform. Acquia recommends you use the Acquia Lightning Drupal distribution as a base profile with the tools provided in Acquia BLT. Lightning extends Drupal 8 to provide profile inheritance, enabling you to create sub-profiles for building distinct groups of websites that share a common baseline of features. After deploying a profile to Acquia Cloud Site Factory and enabling it, website builders may select the profile when creating a new website.
Depending on your needs, your Acquia Cloud Site Factory platform can contain a single profile for use on all websites, sub-profiles for large groups of websites, or nested sub-profiles for more tailored features. When designing your profiles, you must take the following aspects of website governance into account:
Important
To avoid development missteps and wasted effort, do not begin development on individual websites until you have defined your platform’s profile architecture as part of your Acquia Cloud Site Factory governance strategy.
When designing and implementing profiles, consider the following items:
For instructions about enabling installation profiles on your Factory, or selecting a profile when creating a new website, see Managing installation profiles in your Factory.
When selecting a profile architecture for your platform, consider the following questions from a platform—not individual website—perspective:
To work with Acquia Cloud Site Factory, an installation profile must meet the following requirements:
acsf-init
commandFor information about creating a Drupal 7 installation profile for use with your codebase, see How to Write a Drupal 7 Installation Profile on Drupal.org.
The method you use for creating an installation profile depends on the tools you have selected for use in your platform:
Until you have added your installation profiles to your custom distribution and then enabled the installation profiles, Acquia Cloud Site Factory will not display the installation profiles on the Create a new site page.