Docksal integration with Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, and handmade Drupal and Wordpress hostings

If you were waiting for this, behold! The feature is around the corner in the final stages of testing and is waiting to be released in Docksal 1.12. But let’s take a step back and start from the beginning.

Once upon a time…

an integration with command lines tools was released. It brought happiness to the fellow docksalers hearts, for now they had an ability to use Acquia Drush, Terminus, and Platform command line tools from their favorite environment.

But while it perfectly covered their need to run a single command, their daily usage was lacking something. Downloading everything related to the project from the cloud hosting was a multi-step task of running several commands in a row. And when you had to do it several times a day, it might have made you start wondering: is there a better way?..

The Better Way

fin pull command allows you to easily bring your assets: db, files, and code from your hosting environment down to your local environment without manually running through the steps.

How does it work? It stands on the shoulder of the giants, those command line tools integrations mentioned above, but adds a pinch of automagic.

If you’re pulling your project for the first time, then you would run:

fin pull init \
     --hosting-platform=<platform> \
     --hosting-site=<site> \
     --hosting-env=<env> \
     <directory_name>

to initialize the pull of all the data (parameter names may change as we test it). Provide it with the desired platform (acquia, pantheon, platform.sh, drush, or wp), site name (site id) and an environment to pull the data from and voila. Whenever you need to update your local installation from the remote again, you’d just run fin pull. And of course you will be able to go more granular to pull only code, only db, or only files.

This is one of the great things coming up in Docksal 1.12 so stay tuned.