Important
End of Support notice! Acquia has stopped support for Dev Desktop on June 30, 2021. Acquia recommends that you transition to Acquia Cloud IDE for a managed development environment on Cloud Platform. For more information, see Migrating from Dev Desktop to Cloud IDE.
Acquia also provides limited integration with open source alternatives to Cloud IDE for local development. For more information, see Local development solutions.
When you install Acquia Dev Desktop and add one or more Drupal websites, the following directories and files are created in your local file system, depending on whether you are using macOS or Windows:
macOS directories and files
Directory/File | Description |
|---|---|
| The virtual hosts file for all websites known to the Acquia Dev Desktop application. |
| A package that contains the configuration files for Acquia Dev Desktop. |
| A directory containing Acquia Dev Desktop websites. |
| When you upgrade to a newer version of Acquia Dev Desktop, your existing installation is backed up to this directory. |
| The website configuration files included by |
| Drush aliases for local and Cloud Platform websites (downloaded from Cloud Platform). These aliases include the host, application, user, site, and environment of the Cloud Platform website. |
| Drush aliases for all remote Cloud Platform-hosted websites known to Acquia Dev Desktop. These aliases include the host, application, user, site, and environment of the website. |
Any passwords or user names in these files are encrypted to protect your security.
If you chose something other than the default locations for the Acquia Dev Desktop stack location and sites directory when you installed Acquia Dev Desktop, these paths will vary, based on the locations you chose.
Note
In macOS, the /.acquia directory is hidden. To locate the directory:
Open Finder.
In the menu bar, select Go > Go to folder.
Enter the path of the directory, and then click Go.
Windows directories and files
Directory/File | Description |
|---|---|
| The virtual hosts file for all websites known to the Acquia Dev Desktop application. |
| The executable file for Acquia Dev Desktop. |
| A directory containing Acquia Dev Desktop websites. |
| When you upgrade to a newer version of Acquia Dev Desktop, your existing installation is backed up to this directory. |
| The website configuration files included by |
| Drush aliases for local and Cloud Platform websites (downloaded from Cloud Platform). These aliases include the host, application, user, site, and environment of the Cloud Platform website. |
| Drush aliases for all remote Cloud Platform-hosted websites known to Acquia Dev Desktop. These aliases include the host, application, user, site, and environment of the website. |
| Basic configuration settings for each environment in Acquia Dev Desktop. |
Any passwords or user names in these files are encrypted to protect your security.
If you chose something other than the default locations for the Acquia Dev Desktop stack location and sites directory when you installed Acquia Dev Desktop, these paths will vary, based on the locations you chose.