Install Open Social Distribution from github

Patheon provides a free account which gives you access to make 3 sandbox sites completely free of charge.
Some features are restricted but you have more than enough for any dev to make a great site.

Installing Open Social can be done in 2 ways

Upstream or manual. Upstream is not included as part of the free service so for this tutorial I will use the manual method.

log in to your dashboard and from the Sites tab, select Create new site.

Give the site a meaningful name and hit continue

Next select Deploy 

Now we are on the Dev page that has all the information for the dev setup of the installation.

We don't want to complete the installation until we have added open social.

Now we need to put the site into GIT mode to do this we swap from 'Cloud' to 'Local'.

Now we need to locally setup open social from the git-repo. Move to the folder you usually do development from in my case this would be /srv/http/

• cd /srv/http/
• git clone https://github.com/lquessenberry/OpenSocialOnPantheon.git YOURSITEFOLDERNAMEHERE
• cd YOURSITEFOLDERNAMEHERE
• composer install
• composer drupal-scaffold
• git add .
• git commit -m "web and vendor directory from composer install"
• git remote set-url origin ssh://[email protected]:2222/~/repository.git [your ID is displayed here see image 5 as below]

• git remote set-url origin ssh://codeserver.dev.c3175d12-5b6e-4801-8e79-0b71b018805d@codeserver.dev...
• git push --force origin master

Agree to connect to the server and enter your password for your pantheon dashboard

Let the command run when it is finished the last few lines should look like this:

Installation side note
Note that this example repository sets the installation profile to 'standard' in settings.php, so that the installer will not need to modify the settings file. If you would like to install a different profile, modify settings.php appropriately before installing your site.

Using composer for updates with Pantheon
Because we are using a composer setup we have to issue composer commands in order to update the site and make composer changes to the site. We can either do this locally or use terminus in sFTP mode

Always backup before making changes
Before doing any updates you should always make a backup.
From the sidebar select backups and create a new backup.
Set the duration to keep the backup 'keep this backup for' and select 'Create new backup'
If you have a paid account with Pantheon you can also enable a schedule for automatic backups as well.

Now we have a backup let's update the code so it is more current before running the installation.

Back on our local development cd into the project folder that contains the JSON file and run. 

• composer update --with-dependencies
• git push --force origin master

Now that we have our code pushed to Pantheon we need to swap to sFTP Cloud mode to complete the installation 

While going through the installation process if you want to enable the demo content you need to select the tick boxes on the configure site page.

After the installation with demo content, your site should look something like this

Original source of guide: https://github.com/lquessenberry/OpenSocialOnPantheon