Getting Started with Pantheon

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    Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon Getting Started with Pantheon Addison Berry
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    OK, so it's time to actually get started using Pantheon.
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    In this lesson, we're going to go ahead and create an account.
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    We'll create our first site.
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    We're going to take a tour of the interface so you can see what you get
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    both with your account and within that first site that we've created.
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    And importantly, we're going to review the credentials that you need.
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    We're going to look at SSH keys and how to connect to a new site that you've created.
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    These will be important things for you to keep track of.
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    In order to get started with Pantheon, you're obviously going to need to go to their website
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    which is at Pantheon.io.
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    And then from here you'll see we want to create a free account.
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    And we'll just go ahead and do that real quickly.
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    So once you have your account created,
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    the first time that you get in, you're going to see a very kind of simple dashboard here,
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    a list of sites, which I haven't created any yet. We'll do that in a minute.
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    Organizations, this is Pantheon for agencies,
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    and we'll talk about that more later.
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    If you want to actually have your whole organization, your company working on sites in here together.
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    The support is simply your Pantheon Support area.
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    And then of course we have Account information.
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    And this is sort of your standard fill in your information kind of thing here.
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    The important thing I want to point out on this screen though,
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    under your Account is your SSH Keys.
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    In order to use Git which I highly recommend
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    and it really is kind of a standard way of doing things especially on Pantheon,
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    you're going to need to have an SSH Key.
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    So if I click on this under my account information here,
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    You'll see it tells me I don't have any SSH Keys here yet obviously.
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    If you don't know what an SSH Key is or how to create one,
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    there is a link here to documentation from Pantheon
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    on how to do this and how to get it all set up.
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    Briefly, an SSH Key is a Secure Shell Key
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    so that you can identify yourself basically through computers.
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    And when you generate an SSH Key,
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    you get a private Key which you keep to yourself
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    and you get a public key which you give out.
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    And then that public key and that private key can match up
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    and then that will verify you.
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    So for more information, you would want to read this documentation here.
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    Once you've generated the SSH Key— it's not hard,
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    there's software on all the different operating systems to do this—
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    you want to generate the SSH Key on your local machine
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    and then you need to add the SSH Key here
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    so that Pantheon will be able to verify you
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    as you're working with Git.
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    It's a requirement of working with Git.
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    And so I'm just going to go ahead and add my SSH Key in here real quickly.
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    So I'll add the key,
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    and now you can see I have my local SSH Keys in here
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    and that means when I start using Git it will all work properly.
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    So this is an important step to make sure that you take care of this.
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    It will make your whole workflow with Pantheon much better.
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    So let's go back to Sites.
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    Let's actually just go ahead and create our first site
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    and just see what this process looks like.
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    So this is just going to create a blank vanilla site for me.
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    Give it any name that you want.
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    This is the—you can see the site development URL is showing up underneath here.
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    So that's what you'll be using while you're working on it.
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    But that's not necessarily the final domain name of your site.
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    When you launch it live, you can set up a real domain name.
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    But obviously you probably want it to match somewhat.
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    Now I have two options, Start from Scratch or Import Archives.
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    We're going to do importing later.
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    I just want to start from scratch, and I'm going to create a Drupal 7 site.
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    You can see we have WordPress, Drupal 7, Drupal 6.
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    There's also a number of distributions for Drupal that you can choose,
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    so you can start off with any of those as your base site.
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    I'm just going to do a plain Drupal 7 site.
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    Once the site is done, I can visit my Pantheon dashboard.
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    This is going to take me to the site dashboard that I've just installed.
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    You can see right off that bat it's letting me know a little bit of what's going on here.
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    One of the first things that people want to do when they get to their site, of course,
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    is be able to connect to it, so you can actually start dealing
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    with things in the code and that kind of a thing.
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    So here's some helpful links to help you get sorted out
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    with documentation on that front.
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    But let's take a quick tour and see what this dashboard is giving us here.
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    So here's my site. I have my sandbox.
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    If I wanted to invite other people, I could invite other people to work on this site.
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    And then I have my general settings
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    which is mostly about being able to launch it,
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    adding the billing information and that kind of a thing for this site.
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    Now we have 4 items here, and you'll notice I'm in Dev.
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    So when it first creates a new site for you,
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    it's going to create a development environment site for you.
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    So that's why I'm in the Dev tab here.
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    You'll notice we also have Test and Live,
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    and these are the other two environments that you can have in Pantheon.
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    But I haven't obviously created those yet or done anything with those,
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    so we're going to just sort of stick in Dev right now.
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    Now you'll also notice we have this Multidev tab over here.
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    Multidev is a feature of Pantheon for agencies.
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    And so this is what allows you to have multiple development environments
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    instead of just this one development environment.
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    And we'll take a much deeper look at that later on in this series.
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    So I'm just going to stick to this now.
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    Now that I have this brand new Dev environment site created,
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    what do I have? So I can obviously go to the site.
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    So I could go to the actual Drupal installation
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    and go through the installation process and begin building my site.
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    So that's handy. And then we have these sections of our dashboard here.
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    So it starts off with code.
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    As you can see, you can choose to do SFTP or Git.
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    In the background, Pantheon is using Git.
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    You can check your connection information here.
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    So this shows me I'm in SFT mode,
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    so this shows me the SFT connection information.
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    I can switch this over to Git.
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    And once I switch it over to Git, you'll see it got rid of sort of that
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    Manual Making Commit message kind of thing.
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    It's giving me the SSH information here,
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    and it's giving me my Git connection information.
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    And again, it's talking about that SSH Key that I need.
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    So here's documentation on how to go ahead and get the Git clone going
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    and get going with my website development. So that information is here.
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    You can also—up here there's this Connection Info button.
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    If I click on this, this gives me all of the connection information that I need.
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    So Git, SFTP, and my database connection information.
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    We'll go down to Status.
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    This is just looking like if there's any updates on the status of the site.
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    There's nothing particular that's happening right now since it's a new site.
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    Workflow, we'll talk about workflow,
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    and then I'll test in Live.
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    And getting things all in sync, we'll talk about that more later.
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    There are currently no errors on my site.
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    That's good for a freshly installed site.
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    Domains in SSL—
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    so as I said, the domain name, that jumping cow that I put at the beginning,
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    that's part of my domain name for the development environment.
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    If I wanted to change the domain name from this,
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    which is what Pantheon generated for me, to something else,
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    I can choose a paid plan to actually give it
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    some other domain name if I wanted to. This is going to work fine for me.
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    And then again, SSL is something else again.
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    Once you're ready to launch your site, if you need SSL and stuff like that,
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    you would pay for that as part of the plan for your launch.
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    Backup, so I can create a backup.
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    This is my Dev environment, so it's not particularly critical,
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    but you can manually create backups here
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    and say how long you wanted them for.
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    You can create a backup schedule, but, again, that's something you'd need to add
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    to your plan and then pay for that.
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    And then security. So right now,
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    if you go to the jumping cow domain,
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    the site is up and running and it's available to the public.
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    If I wanted to lock that down— as I'm doing development,
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    I don't want people just randomly on the Internet finding the site or something like that.
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    You can lock it, and this will set up HTTP Authentication.
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    So that's like when you go to a website and the little window pops down
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    that asks for a password in order for you to actually access the website.
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    So you can actually set that up
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    by just putting this information in here and it will lock it down.
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    So that can be really nice to just keep eyes
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    off of your development site while you're working on it.
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    And you can see here the access is currently public
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    and this is also indicated up here.
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    So I can quickly see if I'm Public or Locked.
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    If you're looking at this, it will— if you click on that,
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    it would take you to this screen if you wanted to change those settings.
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    And then of course up here we also have the Clear Caches button.
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    It's kind of a classic thing on a Drupal site in particular
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    to clear all the caches.
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    So that's a quick tour of creating a new site
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    and what the interface actually looks like once you've created a new site.
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    So all of your sites will have this interface.
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    If I go up here to my account name,
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    you'll see I can go back to my main dashboard
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    which is just my overall account information.
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    But it also lists the sites so I can jump to a particular site
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    if I had a bunch of sites listed here.
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    And so back on the dashboard, you can now see that I have my site
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    has been created and is set up here,
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    and I can create another site if I would like to.
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    And this is where I can start managing
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    all the things that I'm going to be doing in Pantheon.
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    So in this lesson, we went ahead—
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    we went to Pantheon.io, we created an account there,
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    we created our first site,
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    and we took a tour of what we had both under the account
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    and once we created the site, that site dashboard that we had.
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    And we reviewed credentials. We reviewed both the SSH Key
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    that's associated with my user account
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    and we also looked at connection credentials that are needed
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    to connect to the individual site that I created
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    under the site dashboard for SFTP and Git and the database and that kind of a thing.
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    So now that's the basics of getting up and going with Pantheon.

Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon

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Getting Started with Pantheon

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10 minutes 44 seconds // HDCC //

To get up and running with Pantheon, you'll need to create an account. In this tutorial we'll get signed up and create our first site. Then we'll take a tour of the user dashboard and site dashboard to see what you have to work with. We'll also make sure to point out where you manage your SSH keys for Git and get your connection information to start working on your new site.

Sponsored by Pantheon

Downloads: 
Log in or sign up to download companion files.
Additional resources: 

Pantheon registration
How to Generate SSH keys (pantheon.io)
Pantheon SSH Keys (pantheon.io)

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