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Hosting Provider Integration

DDEV offers hosting provider integration and sample integrations for Pantheon, Platform.sh and Acquia hosting, along with other examples.

Hosting provider integration allows connecting with your upstream hosting. ddev pull <provider> downloads and ddev push <provider> uploads the database and the user-generated files to an upstream provider. It does not push (deploy) or pull your code. Your code should be under version control in for example Git.

DDEV provides ready-to-go integrations for Platform.sh, Acquia, and Lagoon in every project, see the .ddev/providers directory. These can be used as is, or they can be modified as you see fit (but remove the #ddev-generated line so DDEV doesn’t replace them with the defaults).

In addition, each project includes example recipes for Pantheon, Git, local files, and rsync in its .ddev/providers directory, which you can use and adapt however you’d like.

DDEV provides the pull command with whatever recipes you have configured. For example, ddev pull platform is available by default, and ddev pull pantheon is available if you have created .ddev/providers/pantheon.yaml.

DDEV also provides the push command to push database and files to upstream. This is very dangerous to your upstream site and should only be used when appropriate. We don’t even recommended implementing the push stanzas in your YAML file, but it’s there if it suits your workflow.

Each provider recipe is a YAML file that can have whatever name you want. The examples are mostly named after the hosting providers, but they could be named upstream.yaml or live.yaml, so you could ddev pull upstream or ddev pull live. If you wanted different upstream environments to pull from, you could name one “prod” and one “dev” and ddev pull prod and ddev pull dev.

Recipes are provided for Acquia, Local files (like Dropbox, for example), Pantheon, Platform.sh, and rsync. We know you’ll find improvements to these examples and will have lots to contribute for other hosting providers, and we look forward to your contributions as pull requests here or in ddev-contrib.

Each provider recipe is a file named <provider>.yaml and consists of several mostly-optional stanzas:

  • environment_variables: Environment variables will be created in the web container for each of these during pull or push operations. They’re used to provide context (project ID, environment name, etc.) for each of the other stanzas. This stanza is not used in more recent hosting integrations, since providing the environment variables in config.yaml or via ddev pull xxx --environment=VARIABLE=value is preferred.
  • db_pull_command: A script that determines how DDEV should obtain a database. Its job is to create a gzipped database dump in /var/www/html/.ddev/.downloads/db.sql.gz. This is optional; if nothing has to be done to obtain the database dump, this step can be omitted.
  • db_import_command: (optional) A script that imports the downloaded database. This is for advanced usages like multiple databases. The default behavior only imports a single database into the db database. The localfile example uses this technique.
  • files_pull_command: A script that determines how DDEV can get user-generated files from upstream. Its job is to copy the files from upstream to /var/www/html/.ddev/.downloads/files. If nothing has to be done to obtain the files, this step can run true.
  • files_import_command: (optional) A script that imports the downloaded files. There are a number of situations where it’s messy to push a directory of files around, and one can put it directly where it’s needed. The localfile example uses this technique.
  • db_push_command: A script that determines how DDEV should push a database. Its job is to take a gzipped database dump from /var/www/html/.ddev/.downloads/db.sql.gz and load it on the hosting provider.
  • files_push_command: A script that determines how DDEV push user-generated files to upstream. Its job is to copy the files from the project’s user-files directories ($DDEV_FILES_DIRS) to the correct places on the upstream provider.

The environment variables provided to custom commands are also available for use in these recipes.

There are hooks available to execute commands before and after each pull or push: pre-pull, post-pull, pre-push, post-push. These could be for example a ddev snapshot to backup the database before a pull or a specific task to clear/warm-up caches of your application.

Example Integrations and Hints

  • All of the supplied integrations are examples of what you can do.
  • You can name a provider anything you want. For example, an Acquia integration doesn’t have to be named “acquia”, it can be named “upstream”. This is a great technique for downloading a particular multisite.

Provider Debugging

You can uncomment the set -x in each stanza to see more of what’s going on. It really helps. Watch it as you do a ddev pull <whatever>.

Although the various commands could be executed on the host or in other containers if configured that way, most commands are executed in the web container. So the best thing to do is to ddev ssh and manually execute each command you want to use. When you have it right, use it in the YAML file.