Since we introduced the original version of Acquia Dev Desktop, thousands of people have used it to quickly create local Drupal sites on their Mac or Windows PCs. Over the years we have received a lot of great feedback, and so we redesigned Dev Desktop 2 from the ground up, incorporating the most requested improvements. Thousands of users have tried the beta version, and now it's ready for prime time. If you haven't upgraded to the April 3rd release of Dev Desktop 2, download it now and give it a try. It's free!
What's new in Dev Desktop 2?
- A streamlined UI makes it easy to work with all your local Drupal sites and their code, database or files from the GUI or the command line.
- A welcome wizard makes it easy to get started with any Drupal site including:
- many popular Drupal distributions (including Drupal 8)
- any Drupal site on your local machine or any Drupal distribution you download
- Built-in Acquia Cloud integration lets you host any of your local sites for free, or sync locally with any of your Acquia Cloud sites. More on this below.
- The latest xAMP stack components are included including Apache 2.4, MySQL 5.5, as well as PHP 5.6, 5.5, 5.4 and 5.3 so you can easily test your site with multiple PHP versions.
- Drush 7 is configured to manage all of your Drupal sites via the command line. Click Dev Desktop's terminal icon to start a command line pre-configured with Drush aliases for all your sites.
- Browse, query and edit your local site's database using phpMyAdmin.
- Take advantage of Dev Desktop's deep integration with Acquia Cloud to:
- Host your local sites on Acquia Cloud for free. Dev Desktop takes care of packaging up your Drupal site and importing it. Once there leverage Acquia Cloud's scalability, dev and stage team environments, Git workflow, site tests and more.
- Synchronize any code, database, or file changes between your sites on Acquia Cloud and your local sites. Easily pull or push your code, database or files between Acquia Cloud and the local site running in Dev Desktop.
- Add modules to your local file system and then click Push code to add those modules to your Acquia Cloud site and git repository without using Git. Use Git directly for more complex operations.
- SSH in to your Acquia Cloud environment by clicking the terminal icon. Use drush commands to manage it.
- When pulling an Acquia Cloud site database locally, use the sanitize checkbox to scrub the local database's user emails and passwords to keep it secure and prevent accidental email blasts while working on your site.
- Already using Acquia Cloud? Clone any of your Acquia Cloud sites locally to work on them in Dev Desktop and your local toolchain.
And much more
- Keep up to date with the newest Dev Desktop features and fixes by selecting the Check for updates menu. This is also done automatically when Dev Desktop starts.
- Take advantage of the command-line installer to script the installation on multiple machines, or embed it as part of another installer that includes your custom Drupal distribution.
- Create multiple sites sharing the same codebase using Drupal multi-site.
- Easily report feature suggestions or issues via the menu Help > Report an issue.
See it in action!
With these improvements Dev Desktop 2 is the fastest way to create Drupal sites on your Mac or Windows PC, and optionally sync them at any time with Acquia Cloud. Download it now, and try it out! There are more great things in the works so be sure to check for updates regularly.
