Announcing Acquia Dev Desktop End of Life

February 24, 2021
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Acquia Dev Desktop will reach end of life on June 30, 2021. Dev Desktop was a powerful solution when it launched in 2009, but overtime Drupal development practices have evolved beyond it. New and better development environments are now available. With the advent of Acquia Cloud IDE, the best development environment for Drupal, it’s now time to close the book on Dev Desktop.

Dev Desktop’s History

Dev Desktop was first launched in March 2009 (as Drupal Stack Installer) to much fanfare. For many years, it was the de facto starting point for evaluating Drupal and creating new Drupal applications. It was a GUI-based, Windows and OSX compatible, novice-friendly launch pad. It introduced Drupal to many thousands of developers and provided a streamlined user experience for ramping up on the Acquia Cloud Platform. We’re proud to have served many thousands of Drupal developers for well over a decade through Dev Desktop.

Since that launch, we’ve seen the rise of multiple new types of solutions for Drupal development, including Virtual Machines (VMs) and containerized environments (e.g. Docker). These new solutions offer benefits around portability and standardization. Most recently, Cloud-based IDEs have made a breakthrough in this market, bringing additional ease of use, repeatability and performance. It’s time to step into the future.

What’s Next?

If you’re a user of Dev Desktop today, you may ask, “What should I move to now?” We believe the best solution, for the vast majority of organizations, is Acquia Cloud IDE. It is the best development environment for Drupal. With Cloud IDE, you still have your own development environment, but now it’s in the Cloud.

That means you don’t have to download, install, or troubleshoot software on your own machine. Acquia will spin up a brand new Drupal optimized development environment for you and it will work “out of the box.”

Every Cloud Platform customer is entitled to at least one IDE. You can easily spin up a new IDE, pull down a copy of your application and start development in a few minutes. There’s nothing else to it. Migrating from Dev Desktop to Cloud IDE is fast and easy.

If you’re interested in learning about Drupal Cloud, which includes Cloud IDE, please click here to set up a demo.

Thank you to everyone in the community who helped make Dev Desktop a success. We’re pleased to know that it had a positive impact and we’re excited to move forward!

Alternatives

If you’re committed to continuing to develop locally, Acquia will continue to offer a local, open source option through Lando.

Currently, Acquia customers are able to develop Acquia-hosted Drupal applications in Lando with the help of Acquia CLI, which enables synchronizing Acquia application code, databases, and files to and from Lando environments.

Later this year, Acquia will expand the scope of its Lando integration. Stay tuned for future announcements.