---
title: Required Reading: Essential Pantheon Documentation
description: Recommended documentation to learn about Pantheon's technologies.
category:
- getting-started
---Pantheon is not web hosting. It is a highly-tuned, distributed, and instantly scalable web platform. Pantheon also integrates development best practices and tools into the platform, to get the developer back to writing code, not configuring servers and carrying pagers.
Though it incorporates many familiar open-source technologies, it may seem different and new. Fear not!
Our tech includes nginx, PHP, Redis, Varnish, Solr and Git—common tools in web development. You don't have to configure them, but an understanding of how they interact with your applications on Pantheon is important.
We have lots of helpful articles to help you build sites on Pantheon, but here is our curated must-read list for developer success.
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Pantheon Getting Started guide
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The Pantheon workflow
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The technology behind Pantheon
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Known platform considerations on Pantheon
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How SSL & HTTPS are implemented on Pantheon
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Importing a site onto Pantheon
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Using SFTP (and rsync!)
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How to work with settings.php and wp-config.php
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Using Drush on Pantheon
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Cron and Pantheon
- How to point your DNS when going live
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Optimizing for the cloud
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How to enable New Relic
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How core updates work (TL;DR: don't use 'drush up' for core!)
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Caching, both with Varnish and Redis, and how to configure Drupal Performance Settings.
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CDNs can make your site faster and protect against DDOS attacks
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SSO, LDAP, Shibboleth, and other authentication methods
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Backups: Set them up, make them on-demand before you push that bug change, check them from time to time, sleep easy.
- Need to debug? Read PHP Errors and Exceptions and Errors and Server Responses. FTP onto your site and look in /logs, use Terminus to tail your watchdog, and use New Relic.
We love helping developers succeed! We also have limits to the support we can provide. The key to a great relationship is clear expectations of our support scope.