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. 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 machine token:

   1. Log in to your Pantheon Dashboard and Generate a Machine Token for DDEV to use.

   2. Add the API token to the web_environment section in your global DDEV configuration at $HOME/.ddev/global_config.yaml (see global configuration directory).

      web_environment:
          - TERMINUS_MACHINE_TOKEN=your_token
      

   What if I have more than one API token?

   To use multiple API tokens for different projects, add them to your per-project configuration using the .ddev/config.local.yaml file instead. This file is gitignored by default.

   web_environment:
       - TERMINUS_MACHINE_TOKEN=your_token
   

2. 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 third 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.

3. For ddev push pantheon make sure your public SSH key is configured in Pantheon under 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. Add DDEV_PANTHEON_SITE and DDEV_PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT variables to your project .ddev/config.yaml:

   web_environment:
       - DDEV_PANTHEON_SITE=yourprojectname
       - DDEV_PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT=dev
   

   You can also do this with ddev config --web-environment-add="DDEV_PANTHEON_SITE=yourprojectname,DDEV_PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT=dev".

   You can usually use the site name, but in some environments you may need the site ID, which is the long third 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.

   Instead of setting the environment variables in configuration files, you can use ddev pull pantheon --environment=DDEV_PANTHEON_SITE=yourprojectname,DDEV_PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT=dev for example.

   Legacy Variable Names

   The old PANTHEON_SITE and PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT variable names are still supported for backward compatibility but are deprecated. These names conflict with Pantheon’s own environment variables, which can cause applications to misidentify their runtime environment. Using DDEV_PANTHEON_SITE and DDEV_PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT is strongly recommended.

7. Run ddev restart.

8. Run ddev pull pantheon. DDEV will download the Pantheon database and files and bring them into the local DDEV environment. You should now be able to access the project locally.

9. Optionally use ddev push pantheon to push local files and database to Pantheon. The ddev push command can potentially damage your production site, so we don’t recommend using it.

Using Existing Backups vs Fresh Database Dumps¶

By default, ddev pull pantheon generates a fresh database dump, which ensures you get the most current data but can take several minutes. For faster pulls, you can use existing Pantheon backups instead.

To use existing backups, set DDEV_USE_PANTHEON_BACKUP=true:

# In .ddev/config.yaml
web_environment:
    - DDEV_USE_PANTHEON_BACKUP=true

Or use it for a one-time pull:

ddev pull pantheon --environment=DDEV_USE_PANTHEON_BACKUP=true