#acquia dev desktop

[morethanthemes]

The beginner’s guide to installing a premium Drupal 8 theme using Acquia Dev Desktop 2

It doesn’t take being a web developer to get started — nor to enjoy the goodness of Drupal 8.

In (the unlikely) case you don’t already know Acquia Dev Desktop, it is a free app that makes it easy to set up and develop your Drupal site on your computer’s hard drive, making sure everything looks right, well before you deploy online.

Without Acquia Dev Desktop you would need to use a package like XAMPP (Windows) or MAMP (Mac OS), and resort to a number of different tools and user interfaces, including phpMyAdmin to install and develop your Drupal site locally. None of that is rocket science, but all of those can be somewhat intimidating if you’ve heard the best about Drupal 8 (and rightfully so!) and are just starting out.

With Acquia Dev Desktop you can do everything easily, through a single, clean user interface.

Read on in our Medium.com post.

[cuteapoot]

View Acquia Dev Desktop sites in a VM

I just needed to write this down so I don't forget it. I use Acquia Dev Desktop for my local Drupal development, and I found an awesome script at https://github.com/xdissent/ievms that installed VMs in VirtualBox with every version of Internet Explorer from IE6 to IE11 installed. However, since my sites are just on my local computer, I wasn't sure how to connect my VM with those sites. After a little digging (and a wild goose chase involving xip.io, which looks promising but was too much work for it to be worth my time at the moment), I realized it's actually really easy!

First off, you want to find your hosts file on the host machine (your computer). On my Mac, it's stored at /etc/hosts. DevDesktop auto-generated entries for the sites I had set up already:

# Acquia Dev Desktop automatically-added local addresses 127.0.0.1 bankcarduniversity-com.local 127.0.0.1 tm-university-com.local 127.0.0.1 volunteers-aarp-sdinstructortraining-org.local 127.0.0.1 drupal8.local 127.0.0.1 wealthmanagementuniversity-com.local

All those entries are doing is telling my computer to look at the ip address 127.0.0.1, which is always just the computer you're working from, whenever I type in one of those other addresses into my browser. So if I go to http://bankcarduniversity-com.local:8083/, it's actually looking for whatever's at http://127.0.0.1:8083/.

So why not just do the same thing with my VM?

Of course, working from my VM, I don't want to access 127.0.0.1, because that would be looking at the VM instead of the host machine. In order to access the host machine, I just peeked at my network configuration settings, where it told me my current IP address was 10.20.3.93. Since my VM and my host machine are on the same network (through the magic of VirtualBox), I know that my VM can "see" my host computer at 10.20.3.93.

So I open up the VM's hosts file. On Windows, the file is tucked away in C:\\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (at least on Windows XP, which is what my IE8 virtual machine is running). Open that file, and basically you just copy and paste from the host machine's hosts file, trading out 127.0.0.1 for your network IP, which in my case was 10.20.3.93:

10.20.2.93 bankcarduniversity-com.local 10.20.2.93 tm-university-com.local 10.20.2.93 volunteers-aarp-sdinstructortraining-org.local 10.20.2.93 drupal8.local 10.20.2.93 wealthmanagementuniversity-com.local

After saving my hosts file on my VM, I was able to navigate to http://tm-university-com.local:8083/, and it brought up exactly the web site I expected!