Acquia Learning Series

Acquia's open cloud platform delivers your Drupal site to the world in a scalable and secure manner. This series provides an introduction to deploying code on the Acquia Cloud. It covers the essential topics:

  1. Accessing and making changes to your code via Git.
  2. Installing a Drupal distribution.
  3. Importing an existing site.
  4. Connecting your site to the Acquia Network.
  5. Deploying your changes to the world.

If you do not already have a free Acquia Network account, you may obtain one from Acquia.

Tutorials in this course
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This overview will introduce you to Acquia's open cloud platform and this series of lessons that will show you how to best use it. If you do not already have a free Acquia Network account, you may obtain one from Acquia.

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The video will walk you through getting your code setup with Acquia Cloud. This lesson covers:

  • Adding your SSH public key to the Cloud dashboard.
  • Performing a Git checkout with TortoiseGit to clone your repository.
  • Adding new files to your repository.
  • Pushing new (and changed) files to Acquia Cloud.

If you don't use Windows and TortoiseGit, or if you want a better overview of Git itself, we have an entire series on Git, which will show you how to install Git and use it from the command line, including doing a git clone command. Once you get things set up with Git, you can refer back to this video to see where you get the Acquia-specific Git information you need.

This is Step-1 of the Free Tier on-boarding process for Acquia Cloud.

After setting up Git, you may proceed in two directions: You can either Install Drupal Distro or if you already have an existing site, you can go ahead and import your site.

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You can install one of several Drupal distributions from within the Cloud Network dashboard. Installing Drupal in this manner will remove a previously installed distribution. Assuming you want to create a new installation of Drupal, complete the following steps:

  1. On your Acquia Cloud dashboard, navigate to "Workflow".
  2. On the Dev server tab, mouse over the gear icon, and select "Install Drupal".
  3. From the list of supported distributions, select the one most appropriate for your needs. This tutorial uses Acquia Drupal 7.
  4. Enable the checkbox which reminds you your installation will overwrite everything in your Dev environment.

Once your site has been created, you may visit it by clicking on the link "visit" in the Dev environment tab. From here you will be able to complete the installation and log into your new site.

This is Step-2 of the Free Tier on-boarding process for Acquia Cloud.

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If you already have a Drupal Web site, you can import it to Acquia Cloud using the following steps:

  1. Create a drush archive of your existing site, using the command: $ drush archive-dump
  2. Copy the archive to your local computer so that it can be uploaded via a Web interface.
  3. In the Acquia Cloud dashboard, navigate to the "Workflow" tab.
  4. Hover over the gear icon and click on "Import an existing site" from the list of options. A pop-up window will open.
  5. Click the link "Upload a Drush site archive".
  6. Click "Choose file" and select the archive you made previously from your local computer.
  7. Enable the checkbox to say you understand this will replace anything currently installed on your dev environment.
  8. Click "Import".

Note: This will only work for archives that are smaller than 500MB. If your site is larger than this, you will need to refer to Acquia Cloud's documentation.

This is Step-3 of the Free Tier on-boarding process for Acquia Cloud

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To be able to use Search and Insight, you will need to connect your site to the Acquia Network. The video will walk you through this process and help you get connected to the network easily.

  1. Install the Drupal Connector module if you did not use one of the Acquia distributions to install your site.
  2. From within your site, click on the link asking you to connect your site to the Acquia Network. It should appear as a nag screen on every page.
  3. Enter the email address and password you use to login to the Acquia Network.
  4. Click Next.

Your site should now be connected to the Acquia Network.

This is Step-4 of the Free Tier on-boarding process for Acquia Cloud

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This lesson describes how to drag-and-drop to deploy code and content using the Acquia Cloud UI.

  1. Navigate to the Acquia Cloud dashboard, and select the "Workflow" link.
  2. From the Dev column, click and drag the box labelled "Code", and place it onto the Stage column. A pop-up window will appear.
  3. Enter a commit message.

Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the "Files" and "DB" boxes in the Dev column.

You may drag-and-drop these boxes (Code, Files, DB) in either direction: from Dev to Stage; or from Stage to Dev. If you would like to deploy your code to a live server, you will need to upgrade from the Acquia Free account. You can do this by clicking the link "Upgrade now" from the "Prod" column.

This is Step-5 of the Free Tier on-boarding process for Acquia Cloud.