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Introducing the Acquia Cloud API and Drush CLI

  • 3 minute read

Acquia Cloud has two brand-shiny-new interfaces today!

  • The Acquia Cloud API is a RESTful web interface that allows developers to extend, enhance, and customize Acquia Cloud. It includes developer workflow, site management, and provisioning capabilities.
  • The Acquia Cloud Drush commands allow using all features of the Cloud API on the command line or from shell scripts using the excellent Drush command line tool.

Let's start with a demo. It's kind hard to demo an API, so instead I'll use the Drush Cloud commands to deploy a site as shown in this video:

What can Cloud API do?

In today’s beta release, Cloud API can do most of the things needed as part of your daily site development and continuous integration process.

  • Workflow. Deploy code, databases, and user-uploaded files across from Development, Staging, and Production environments. Just like the Cloud UI, the Cloud API lets you run any branch or tag from your Git or SVN repo in any environment. If you prefer a command-line tool over drag-and-drop, this is for you!
  • Backups. Create, restore, and delete backups of one or all of your site’s databases (Acquia Cloud fully supports Drupal multi-site with as many databases per codebase as you need).
  • Retrieve current information about your site, environments, deployed code, databases, backups, and tasks.

Even better, the real magic behind Cloud API is its integration with Cloud Hooks, which let you automate nearly any action to be performed along with your Workflow actions. You can:

  • Perform Drupal database updates or run your test suite when new code is deployed, and roll back to a previous release if the tests fail.
  • "Scrub" your Production database when it is copied to Dev or Staging by removing customer emails or disabling production-only modules.
  • Integrate with third-party services, such as by performing a Blitz.io performance test, when you deploy new code.

Getting Started

Cloud API is available today in beta test. If you want to try it out, submit a support ticket requesting access, and we’ll get you set up as soon as we can. Don’t have Acquia Cloud yet? No problem, just sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Additional resources:

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