Launch Your Site on Pantheon

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    Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon Launch Your Site on Pantheon Addison Berry
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    So now that we've prepared our site and it's ready to go
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    and we've selected a payment plan, we can now actually launch the site.
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    The big day has come.
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    So in this lesson,
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    we're going to finish things up by checking in on our scheduled backups,
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    and then we're going to look at adding a domain name and then how you would get
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    the information to update your DNS to make sure that the domain name
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    will work with your DNS provider. And then we'll also take a look at adding an SSL certificate
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    so you can have HTTPS on your site.
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    So I'm in my site dashboard again. And you can see I've signed up for Pro.
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    So I have this paid for so that we can launch it. And Pro also gives me access
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    to SSL. So you need to be at the Pro level or higher for that.
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    So there's 3 things I wanted to do. First I'm going to check in
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    on my backups. So you always have this backup log here.
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    But you can now schedule the backups so you'll have regularly scheduled backups
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    that'll happen all the time. Once you have a paid plan, you can have the scheduled backups happening.
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    And so we want to make sure that that is enabled. It's enabled by default.
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    You can pick the day that your weekly backup is going to happen.
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    So whichever day works best for you. And you'll also notice
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    it's telling me it does it once a day for one week, and then the weekly backups
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    are retained for one month. And again, that is dependent on the plan that I have.
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    So if you had a business plan, it would be a little bit longer.
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    So backups are set. We just wanted to check and verify that that is working
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    because that's going to be important. So the important part for actually launching the site
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    and getting it out there is the domain. So under Domains, we're just simply going to add
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    the domain name that we're going to use. So once I have the domain name entered,
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    first you'll notice that it has this check box to also add the www,
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    because we want the www to go to the same site. So yes,
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    this is a best practice, so I definitely want to do that as well.
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    And then you'll also notice it's giving me this information
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    for the DNS provider. So this is how I would actually— these are the values
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    that I need to have in my DNS records with my DNS provider.
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    So wherever you purchased the domain name, you need to go there
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    into the DNS settings and add these DNS records so that they will point to Pantheon
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    and then Pantheon can actually deliver your site for you.
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    So I'm going to go ahead and just say Add domain.
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    And you can see this information is still showing up for me, letting me know
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    that that's there. You can see that we have both of these domain names
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    have been added. I can easily remove them just by clicking the Remove link.
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    And if I ever need to get back to this screen for the DNS information,
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    you can just show recommended DNS records. You can click on that
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    and get back to this information whenever you need it.
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    Now keep in mind, all I've done is add the domain name.
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    If I try to go to this domain name, nothing's going to happen
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    because I don't have DNS set up yet. So you want to set up your DNS,
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    and then you're going to have to wait for the DNS server to propagate that information
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    out to the web before people will see your site.
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    So that's getting the domain name set up and where you get your DNS information.
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    And then the last thing is doing SSL. So it's disabled by default.
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    Because I'm on a Pro plan, I can enable it. So I will enable that.
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    And we're going to—basically you're going to need to get the information
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    from whoever is providing your certificate. You're going to need to get the actual certificate information.
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    Now, Pantheon has really good documentation.
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    It gets very detailed into what you actually need for this. So you can go through these steps.
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    You're going to need your key, and you need to actually get the CSR.
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    And it has some information about types of certificates and a list of providers
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    for certificates if you need to still get that set up.
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    But basically you need to get the certificate which is completely and wholly unrelated
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    to Pantheon before you can actually add that. And then, back under Domains / SSL
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    when you click the SSL tab, then you have the boxes here where you would paste in
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    the key and the certificate information, and then you would add the certificate
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    and HTTPS will be enabled on your site. And with that, you are good to go.
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    Your site is live. People are hitting it. And the site is running smoothly.
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    So to just sort of recap
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    what we covered in this lesson to finally launch the site,
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    we went ahead and made sure that our backups were scheduled properly.
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    So it's just a good thing. It's enabled by default, but just double-check it.
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    Make sure that the schedule is what you expected.
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    And then we looked at how to actually add a domain name,
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    and we talked about also adding the www version of that domain name.
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    And how we could get our DNS information so that we can update
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    the DNS so the domain name actually works. That's handy.
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    And then we also took a look at how to add an SSL certificate.
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    So once you go and get the certificate, you can come back
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    and you'll just need to copy and paste in your certificate and key information
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    into the Settings for the site, and HTTPS will be up and running for you.
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    So you have successfully launched a Pantheon Drupal site.

Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon

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Launch Your Site on Pantheon

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5 minutes 51 seconds // HDCC //

Your finally ready to share your site with the world! In this tutorial we'll walk through the process of launching our Pantheon site. We'll review all of the settings to add our domain name to the Live environment and explain how it all works.

Sponsored by Pantheon

Downloads: 
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Additional resources: 

Going Live on Pantheon (pantheon.io)

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