Re installing in Acquia non production

Audience: Sitewide administrators, developers

This guide has been developed by the OpenScholar at Harvard maintenance and development team. You may find this useful as a reference for a secure production re-install workflow, especially if you're using a similar hosting enviornment to Acquia Cloud.

Overview

These are steps to take when a production install of OpenScholar is to be "wiped", or re-installed from scratch. Due to security concerns, it's better to install in a non-production environment, then copy the non-production database into the production database. Additionally, you probably want to install via install.php (not drush) to ensure no memory issues and ensure no other install errors occur.

With those assumptions in mind, here's the full instructions:

1. Find the Drupal core version your install is using. Clone the drupal core repository and check out this version branch anywhere on your local machine.
2. Clone your hosted repository. In Acquia's case, this is the git repository whose URL resides in the Cloud control panel.
3. Check out a non-production branch (i.e. the active branch in your chosen dev or staging environment)
4. Copy the install.php file from your drupal core repository into your hosted repository's docroot folder.
5. Add, commit, and push so that install.php is now (temporarily) accessible from a non-production environment in your browser.
6. If necessary, use drush sql-drop on your browser-accessible environment, or execute DROP DATABASE and CREATE DATABASE so that when you access install.php, it doesn't throw an error or say "already installed".
7. Run through the install process at install.php
8. Once installed, run drush rr && drush cc all in the fresh environment.
9. Verify that Clean URLs are enabled at /admin/config/search/clean-urls
10. Verify that new site registration works at /site/register
11. Copy the database into the production environment
12. Run drush rr && drush cc all in the production environment
13. Verify that the purl_base_domain variable matches the production URL.
14. As above, verify that Clean URLs and site registration both work.
15. Verify in /admin/people/permissions that the correct roles have access to create sites.*
16. Optionally, enable HWP themes in /admin/appearance, then set featured themes in /admin/config/openscholar
17. Done!

• Note: For our demo install, we modify default install permissions to allow anonymous users to "create new", "edit own" and "delete own" for each of "Department site", "Personal site" and "Project site" content types.