Updating Your Pantheon Site From The Latest DB Backup

I can't claim credit for this, but I wanted to share a really powerful and useful addition we add to our .lando.yml files in the tooling section. It should be said that this particular use case works for Drupal and Pantheon users.

tooling:
  latest:
    service: appserver
    description: Updates the database from the latest backup
    cmd:
      - mkdir -p /app/artifacts
      - rm -f /app/artifacts/database.sql.gz
      - terminus backup:get site.env --element=db --to=/app/artifacts/database.sql.gz
      - database: cd /app && /helpers/sql-import.sh artifacts/database.sql.gz
      - drush cc all && drush en devel stage_file_proxy -y && drush sql-sanitize --sanitize-password="1234" --yes

For Drupal 8, we setup config split to handle separate development configurations, so our last line looks something like this:

- cd /app/web && drush cr && drush sql-sanitize --sanitize-password="1234" --yes && drush cr && drush config-split:import config_dev -y

Once you add this, then you can type lando latest whenever you want to refresh your local environment to bring it up to date with the latest database backup.

The first time you run this, you may run into an issue where your environment cannot download the backup because you need to authenticate it with Pantheon. Basically, create a machine token and then type lando terminus auth:login --machine-token=[TOKEN]. You may have multiple Drupal/Pantheon environments and you will need to authenticate each one, but you only need to do that once, even if you restart/rebuild the app.

You could still use this for non-Pantheon cases, but you'll have to change the terminus command to something that grabs your latest database backup and copies it into the artifacts folder.

You'll also want to add the artifacts folder to your .gitignore file so you don't commit any database backups.