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Pantheon Integration

ddev provides configurable integration with the Pantheon Website Management Platform, which allows Pantheon users to quickly download and provision a project from Pantheon in a local ddev-managed environment.

ddev's Pantheon integration pulls an existing backup from an existing Pantheon site/environment into your local system. Of course that means you must already have a Pantheon site with a backup in order to use it.

Pantheon Quickstart

If you have ddev installed, and have an active Pantheon account with an active site, you can follow this guide to spin up a Pantheon project locally.

  1. Get your Pantheon.io machine token: a. Login to your Pantheon Dashboard, and Generate a Machine Token for ddev to use. b. Add the API token to the web_environment section in your global ddev configuration at ~/.ddev/global_config.yaml
web_environment:
- TERMINUS_MACHINE_TOKEN=abcdeyourtoken

  1. Choose a Pantheon site and environment you want to use with ddev. You can usually use the site name, but in some environments you may need the site ID, which is the long 3rd component of your site dashboard URL. So if the site dashboard is at https://dashboard.pantheon.io/sites/009a2cda-2c22-4eee-8f9d-96f017321555#dev/, the site ID is 009a2cda-2c22-4eee-8f9d-96f017321555.

  2. On the pantheon dashboard for the site, make sure that at least one backup has been created. (When you need to refresh what you pull, create a new backup.)

  3. Make sure your public ssh key is configured in Pantheon (Account->SSH Keys)

  4. Check out the project codebase from Pantheon. Enable the "Git Connection Mode" and use git clone to check out the code locally.

  5. Configure the local checkout for ddev using ddev config

  6. If using Drupal 8+, verify that drush is installed in your project, ddev composer require drush/drush. If using Drupal 6 or 7, drush8 is already provided in the web container's /usr/local/bin/drush, so you can skip this step.

  7. In your project's .ddev/providers directory, copy pantheon.yaml.example to pantheon.yaml (Note that this refers to your project .ddev folder and not the global .ddev folder). Edit the project environment variable under environment_variables. It will be in the format <projectname>.<environment>, for example yourprojectname.dev or (in cases of ambiguity) <project_uuid>.<environment>, for example 009a2cda-2c22-4eee-8f9d-96f017321555.dev.

  8. ddev restart

  9. Run ddev pull pantheon. The ddev environment download the Pantheon database and files, and import the database and files into the ddev environment. You should now be able to access the project locally.

  10. Optionally use ddev push pantheon to push local files and database to Pantheon. Note that ddev push is a command that can potentially damage your production site, so this is not recommended.

Last update: July 7, 2022