Acquia

Acquia is a cloud hosting platform for Drupal applications, with managed infrastructure and developer tools.

For general Acquia documentation, refer to the Acquia Documentation.

This page covers how the site behaves once it runs on Acquia. For how code gets there from CI, see Artifact deployment.

Integration

Tasks

With Vortex, you can:

• Fetch a database from an Acquia environment for local development or CI
• Copy the database between Acquia environments (for example, refresh staging from production)
• Copy files between environments to synchronize uploaded content
• Purge the Varnish cache so 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, and clears caches
2. Purges the Varnish edge cache to serve fresh content
3. 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.

Each hook is turned off by setting its skip variable to 1 in the Acquia UI:

Hook	Variable
provision.sh	VORTEX_PROVISION_ACQUIA_SKIP
purge-cache.sh	VORTEX_PURGE_CACHE_ACQUIA_SKIP
notify-deployment.sh	VORTEX_NOTIFY_ACQUIA_SKIP
copy-db.sh	VORTEX_TASK_COPY_DB_ACQUIA_SKIP
copy-files.sh	VORTEX_TASK_COPY_FILES_ACQUIA_SKIP

A hook stops with an error when a value it requires is unset or empty. As a result, a blank field in the Acquia UI aborts the hook rather than running it with a missing value.

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 path for temporary files (file_temp_path) with a 3-tier priority:

1. Default: /tmp
2. Shared GFS mount: If DRUPAL_TMP_PATH_IS_SHARED is set to 1, 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 hosting in the Installation guide and select Acquia.

Routine operations

Fetch database

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

ahoy fetch-db

Run a hosting task

Copying databases or files between environments and purging the edge cache run through a single, platform-agnostic task runner. It dispatches each operation to the implementation for the configured hosting platform:

./vendor/bin/vortex-task <operation>

Operation	Description
copy-db	Copy the database between environments
copy-files	Copy files between environments
purge-cache	Purge the edge (Varnish) cache

The platform is read from VORTEX_PLATFORM, or from VORTEX_TASK_PLATFORM to override a single task. The Acquia deployment hooks export VORTEX_PLATFORM themselves; set it yourself when running an operation manually (for example, from your local machine):

VORTEX_PLATFORM=acquia ./vendor/bin/vortex-task copy-db

Each operation reads its configuration (application name, API credentials, and source and destination environments) from your .env and .env.local files.

Run Drush against remote environments

To run Drush commands against Acquia environments, download your Drush aliases from the Acquia Cloud UI. See Using Drush aliases.