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Introduction

Detailed information on using Pantheon's Multidev environment for your Drupal or WordPress site.

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Multidevs are development environments for teams. A Multidev environment allows a developer to fork the entire stack (code and content), work independently, and then merge the code changes back into the main `master` site. Each forked branch has its own separate development environment, including database and files. Each branch environment can be independently set to use either SFTP or Git mode for code changes.

Each site has a limit of 10 Multidev environments. Elite sites can request additional Multidev environments from support as needed.

Multidev is available for the following accounts:

  • Gold

  • Platinum

  • Diamond

  • Agency partners

Dev Test and Live icon

Check out our pricing page and contact Sales to discuss which plan is best for your needs.

Multidev Access for Team Members and Supporting Agencies

Site admins of an Workspace with Multidev can invite independent contractors or assign an agency as a Supporting Workspace to a site.

The Pantheon platform will automatically choose the highest account tier among the group for the site.

If a Supporting Workspace or individual contributor has an account tier lower than the site owner's tier, their Multidev access will be the same as the site owner's tier.

This logic makes Multidev features, including the ability to create Multidev environments, available to the Supporting Workspace or the site team members on the associated sites.

The assigned team members will be able to create new and manage existing Multidevs for sites within the Workspace as long as that Workspace is a Gold account or higher. This does not affect their account access for other sites or within other Workspaces.

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Benefits of Multidev

Easy workflow: Developers on your team can use a standardized best-practice development workflow in the cloud through their Dashboard.

No more surprises: Multidev makes it easy to keep in sync with code from every team member and content updates from any environment. As a result, deployments become surprisingly predictable.

A fork for every developer on your team: Multidev gets new developers started quickly; you can’t have too many cooks in a Multidev kitchen.

Pantheon standard workflow vs multidev ​

Branching and Multidev Terminology

Branching is a standard mechanism for duplicating source code under revision control for parallel development. Multidev is Pantheon’s support of a branching workflow using the Pantheon platform and Dashboard.

There are a number of terms used throughout the Multidev workflow that will be useful for you and your team to know:

  • Commit: Record snapshot to history.

  • Push: Send changes to a remote repository.

  • Branch: Movable pointer to a set of commits, allowing independent development and history.

  • Environment: Independent infrastructure for a site, including code, database, and files.

  • Fork: To divide in branches, copying source code to start independent development. At Pantheon, we are also copying content (files and database) when forking.

  • Merge: Combine contents of a branch into another, like a bug fix branch into master.

  • Master: Name of default branch; deployed to Pantheon Dev, Test, and Live environments.

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