🚀 Automating Drupal Deployments to Acquia with GitHub Actions

If you’re managing a Drupal site hosted on Acquia Cloud Platform, manual deployments and Drush commands can slow you down and introduce risk.

In this article, I’ll walk you through setting up a production-grade GitHub Actions workflow that deploys to Acquia automatically when a pull request to main is closed (and merged), or when manually triggered.

✅ Why Use GitHub Actions for Acquia?

• Fully automated deployments to Acquia Cloud environments (dev, test, prod)
• Composer install, Drush commands, and config import in one pipeline
• Safe SSH setup and Acquia CLI usage
• Clear separation of environments with optional manual dispatch
• Bonus: Get notifications in Google Chat or Slack after deployment (optional)

🔧 Prerequisites

To make this work, you’ll need:

1. An Acquia Cloud Site (with SSH access enabled)
2. A GitHub repository that holds your Drupal project
3. Public part of your SSH key must be added to Acquia via Cloud > Git > SSH Keys
4. Repository variables named ACQUIA_SITE (e.g. drupalsite) and ACQUIA_GIT_HOST (e.g svn.prod.hosting.acquia.com)
5. The following GitHub Secrets added to your repo:

• ACQUIA_API_KEY_ID – Your Acquia API Key ID
• ACQUIA_API_KEY_SECRET – Your Acquia API Key Secret
• ACQUIA_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY – Private SSH key that has access to your Acquia Cloud Git repo
• Public part of your SSH key must be added to Acquia via Cloud > Git > SSH Keys

🛠️ The GitHub Actions Workflow

Here’s the full YAML workflow, saved as .github/workflows/deploy.yml:

name: Deploy to Acquia
on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]
    types: [closed]
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      environment:
        description: "Environment"
        required: true
        type: choice
        options: [dev, test, prod]
        default: test
env:
  ACQUIA_SITE: ${{ vars.ACQUIA_SITE }}
  ACQUIA_GIT_HOST: ${{ vars.ACQUIA_GIT_HOST }}
  ACQUIA_CLI_NO_INTERACTION: 1
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: ${{ inputs.environment || 'test' }}
    steps:
      - name: Skip if not merged PR or manual trigger
        if: github.event_name == 'pull_request' && github.event.pull_request.merged == false
        run: exit 0
      - name: Set ENV vars
        run: |
          echo "ENVIRONMENT=${{ inputs.environment || 'test' }}" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          echo "BRANCH_NAME=${{ github.ref_name }}" >> $GITHUB_ENV
      - name: Block non-main to prod
        if: env.ENVIRONMENT == 'prod' && env.BRANCH_NAME != 'main'
        run: exit 1
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
        with:
          php-version: '8.3'
          tools: composer
          extensions: mbstring, pdo, xml, gd, curl, zip, bcmath, intl
      - name: Install Composer Dependencies
        run: composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
      - name: Install Acquia CLI
        run: |
          curl -sSL https://github.com/acquia/cli/releases/latest/download/acli.phar -o acli
          chmod +x acli && sudo mv acli /usr/local/bin/acli
      - name: Setup SSH key for Acquia Git
        uses: webfactory/ssh-agent@v0.9.0
        with:
          ssh-private-key: ${{ secrets.ACQUIA_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
      - name: Add Acquia host to known_hosts
        run: ssh-keyscan -H ${{ env.ACQUIA_GIT_HOST }} >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts
      - name: Set Git author info for Acquia commit
        run: |
          git config --global user.name "GitHub Actions"
          git config --global user.email "githubactions@salmanhaider.com"
      - name: Authenticate & Deploy to Acquia
        run: |
          acli auth:login --key=${{ secrets.ACQUIA_API_KEY_ID }} --secret=${{ secrets.ACQUIA_API_KEY_SECRET }}
          acli push:artifact $ACQUIA_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT --no-interaction

          acli remote:drush $ACQUIA_SITE.$ENVIRONMENT -- deploy -y || true

🎯 GitHub Actions UI allowing manual execution by branch and target environment.

✅ Successful deployment log showing artifact push and post-deploy Drush commands on Acquia.

💡 Benefits of This Setup

• Clean & readable GitHub workflow
• Handles Composer install + config import
• Git commit author set (avoids identity errors)
• SSH securely handled using webfactory/ssh-agent
• Production protection — prevents accidental deploys from non-main branches
• Can easily be extended for tag-based deploys, Slack/Chat notifications, or previews

🙌 Final Thoughts

If you’re deploying to Acquia Cloud and want reproducible, safe, and automated deploys — this GitHub Actions workflow will save your team a ton of time. It enforces best practices, reduces human error, and gets you closer to CI/CD bliss 🚀

Got ideas to enhance or optimize this workflow? Let’s collaborate — comment below or connect directly!