From local Drupal 8 development to Acquia Cloud (based on the ICFOlson.com site)

Are you considering hosting your site on Acquia Cloud? Do you develop locally with tools other than Dev Desktop?  Or do you host your project repository in a separate git repository?  Come and learn how to setup your local environment and repository for near seamless integration with Acquia Cloud based on real world lessons ICF Olson learned moving our own brand site to Drupal 8.

We'll discuss what makes a good directory structure for your project repository and how to commit only the custom code/config, leaving out Drupal core and contrib. The drupal-composer/drupal-project template is a great starting point but we will need to covert that into the Acquia Cloud required structure.

Acquia Cloud provides their own git repository if you choose to use it, however many clients and projects use their own private git repository or GitHub/Bitbucket. We'll explore the various options to maintain your development in a separate repository and still push / build out the site to Acquia Cloud.

Acquia provides the Dev Desktop *AMP stack that provides a great way to get started with Drupal development and integrates well with Acquia Cloud. However many developers have their own preference for a local development environment and may not always use Acquia for hosting. We'll take a look at what it takes to use Acquia Dev Desktop, DrupalVM (or similar vagrant boxes), and other typical *AMP local development stacks.

The magic of using Acquia Cloud outside of the Acquia Dev Desktop comes from the use of Drush and the Acquia Cloud API. We'll explore what the Acquia Cloud sites admin UI looks like, what the equivalent Drush and Acquia Cloud API commands are, and how to easily set those up in your local development environment.

Knowledge level required: Basic understanding of Drush and using the command line.