Acquia Dev Desktop and the Drupal 7 test runner

Recently, I tried to run some tests locally and the test runner kept silently failing. Ultimately, it was just giving up during bootstrap. The problem was eventually traced to Acquia’s frustrating modification of the settings.php file; it only loads when $_SERVER['DEVDESKTOP_DRUPAL_SETTINGS_DIR'] is defined.

So in order to make it run, you’ll need to:

1. Define DEVDESKTOP_DRUPAL_SETTINGS_DIR in your CLI environment or:
2. Modify run-tests.sh to populate that value in $_SERVER before bootstrapping Drupal:

$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] = 'Drupal command line'; $_SERVER['DEVDESKTOP_DRUPAL_SETTINGS_DIR'] = '/Users/myusername/.acquia/DevDesktop/DrupalSettings';

Then the test runner will actually do something useful.