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Acquia

Acquia is a cloud hosting platform specifically designed for Drupal applications, offering managed infrastructure, developer tools, and enterprise-grade security.

For general Acquia documentation, refer to the Acquia Documentation.

Integration​

Vortex provides the following integration with Acquia:

Tasks​

With Vortex, you can:

  • Download a database from an Acquia environment for local development or CI
  • Copy the database between Acquia environments (e.g., refresh staging from production)
  • Copy files between environments to synchronize uploaded content
  • Purge the Varnish cache to ensure visitors see fresh content

When running these tasks, your .env and .env.local files are used as the source for the application name and API credentials.

Deployment automation​

When code is deployed, Vortex automatically:

  1. Provisions the site - Runs database updates, imports configuration, clears caches
  2. Purges edge cache - Clears the Varnish cache to serve fresh content
  3. Sends notifications - Notifies configured channels about the deployment

This is implemented using Acquia Cloud Hooks - pre-configured scripts in the hooks/ directory that trigger on code deployments, code updates, and database copy operations.

Environment detection​

Vortex automatically detects when running on Acquia and loads appropriate settings from web/sites/default/includes/providers/settings.acquia.php. This includes Acquia-specific configurations for caching, file paths, and environment variables.

Acquia settings file​

By default, Vortex includes the Acquia-provided settings file from /var/www/site-php/{group}/{group}-settings.inc. You can override this path by setting the DRUPAL_ACQUIA_SETTINGS_FILE environment variable.

Temporary file path​

Vortex configures the temporary file path (file_temp_path) with a three-tier priority:

  1. Default: /tmp
  2. Shared GFS mount: If DRUPAL_TMP_PATH_IS_SHARED is set, uses /mnt/gfs/{group}.{env}/tmp — a per-head mounted directory on Acquia's shared filesystem. This is useful for operations like bulk uploads that require a shared temporary directory across web heads. See Acquia temporary files documentation for details.
  3. Explicit override: If DRUPAL_TMP_PATH is set, its value is used regardless of other settings.

Onboarding​

Acquia onboarding is part of the project setup flow. See Set up integrations in the Installation guide and select Acquia.

Routine Operations​

Download database​

Download a database backup from your Acquia environment for local development or CI builds:

ahoy download-db