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But it doesn’t work so well for large sites. For one thing, the web upload option doesn’t support archives greater than 150MB. Even that size is pushing it. Browsers aren’t really meant for transferring large amounts of data.

Failing that, you can specify a URL from which Pantheon is to download a backup archive. But that’s not really a good idea either. For one thing, you’re downloading in plaintext, unencrypted. Secondly, it’s your webserver which is sending the data. Leaving aside the possibility that a 32-bit server might not be able to handle a file greater than 2GB, your webserver is going to be tied up for a long time serving that file. It’s possible it could tie up your entire network connection, leading to your visitors not being see your website.

Better than that is to upload the file through scp or sftp. Those are meant for transferring data. Note: for the purpose of transferring the archive, it’s fine to zip (gzip) the file. But apparently, Pantheon wants an unzipped tar archive for its tools.

After the archive is ready, you specify the location of the archive in the web interface. It takes a long time: 2-3 hours for a 2GB database. It may seem like it’s hanging, but it’s not.

After the site import process loads the database, it copies the site files over.

When processing the site files, Pantheon makes one change in your settings.php file: It adds a directive to include a Pantheon-specific settings file. But, strangely it doesn’t reference the correct file path. Update it to this:

$pantheon_config_file = '../../../pantheon6.settings.php';
if (file_exists($pantheon_config_file)) {
    include_once $pantheon_config_file;
}

If you had any directives regarding memcache, remove them. Pantheon will add one of its own. Also, there is only one Memcache server at the default port (11211).

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Pantheon provides a Drupal module which is supposed to automagically create a complete backup of your site, which can then be used to migrate it to Pantheon’s servers.

Unfortunately, it seems it doesn’t always work, calling for more unorthodox methods.

Speciically, I wanted to find out what kind of archive it creates. The pushbutton method wasn’t working on this site, which has multi-gigabyte database, so I installed the Pantheon module (pantheon_migrate) on a basically clean install of Drupal, and noted where it saved the archive:

This did the trick in finding it:

find | grep "\.tar"

It saves it in an undesirable location (at a publicly accessible URL which I won’t expose here). So, basically anybody could download your site archive if they were looking for it. Bad Pantheon, bad boy. I guess they did it that way so people who don’t have a clue about webservers can still migrate their sites by clicking a few buttons. I should note that they do provide alternative methods for migration, but you really have to know exactly what the whole process is going to do in order to avoid any security risks.

By the way, it doesn’t compress the archive, either, making for some huge up/downloads.

Once I got to the tar file, I had a look at what was inside with the tar list files command:

tar tf the-site-archive-123.tar | less

Interestingly, it’s a dump of all the files in your site, in a directory of the same name as the tar file (without “.tar”). I.e., when you untar the archive, the files are not dumped in the current directory, but rather reside in another subdirectory. This only matters because Pantheon’s migration tools probably expect your files to be in a certain place in the archive. Note that this is different from what the backup_migrate module does. backup_migrate (required by pantheon_migrate) creates a database dump in a .sql file.

The second thing pantheon_migrate does is put the database dump within a file called database.sql in the same directory in the archive where index.php lives. That’s the actual name of the file, regardless of what your MySQL database is called.

The third thing to note is that pantheon_migrate module also includes your settings.php file. This is interesting in that the main point of settings.php is to contain your database login info, and yet that is obviously going to be different once you’re on the Pantheon server. Acquia’s cloud solution uses a generalized database setting. You include a certain line they give you, and your database settings are automagically set. I have yet to see how Pantheon does it. Also, often, settings.php is left out of source code control. Does Pantheon do that too?

Finally, if there happens to be something in the backup_migrate backup directory, don’t include that directory in the archive. It would be pointless, and sort of mind-spinningly redundant.

After all that, I also had a look at the PHP code of the pantheon_migrate module. It builds off the backup_migrate module by extending the backup_migrate_destination class. Here’s where it does things like exclude the backup directory from the backup, which would create a backup of a backup.

Any insights?

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It’s old, venerable, full of features, complicated, and big. Sort of like Sendmail.

MaraDNS is the secure, small, easy alternative. It’s also open source (like BIND).

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It would basically be impossible for a 2-man startup to find a decent office in NYC. And it’s not like you can just use your garage. After all, how many people in Manhattan have a garage?

So somebody came up with a technology incubator called General Assembly (cute reference to the UN, I guess, which is also in NYC). They have 20k square feet of space, which includes shared areas (library, media room, lounge) and work areas. They also have classrooms and hold classes, too. It’s like you never left college.

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mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO 'myuser@localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
ERROR 1470 (HY000): String 'myuser@localhost' is too long for user name (should be no longer than 16)

The problem is that the single quotes surround both the username and localhost. Instead, you should have two sets of quotes, like so:

'myuser'@'localhost'

This works:

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO 'myuser'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

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