Thread

Hello EE,

It’s been a while since I’ve used EE, but I just picked up a project built in EE - and I am looking forward to getting my feet wet again! My question is fairly simple, just some advice really.

What is the best approach in creating and working from a dev environment? My client’s website is currently live, and Ideally I would like to run the website locally during dev, and once updates/milestones are ready post the site to a staging URL for review.

Is this possible, will I run into any problems with the licensing (or url’s/links) by having the site in 3 locations; Locally, Staging, and Live?

Thanks!

Hello EE,

It’s been a while since I’ve used EE, but I just picked up a project built in EE - and I am looking forward to getting my feet wet again! My question is fairly simple, just some advice really.

What is the best approach in creating and working from a dev environment? My client’s website is currently live, and Ideally I would like to run the website locally during dev, and once updates/milestones are ready post the site to a staging URL for review.

Is this possible, will I run into any problems with the licensing (or url’s/links) by having the site in 3 locations; Locally, Staging, and Live?

Thanks!

I think that the best approach would be to run it locally. For instance, I have a local server with virtualhost set up so I set my development ending with .dev, for example, mysite.com (remote) mysite.dev(local) to make it easier to import the database and path within EE. Some people prefer to develop the entire site remotely, which it could be an issue with your internet connection is not that great. The licensing questions is a good one.

@Juliano

Thats a good idea, I want it to be the least amount of work as possible, from pushing updates locally to remote. With the setup you have, did you run into any issues with licensing?

Any more ideas/thoughts out there?

Thanks!

Is this possible, will I run into any problems with the licensing (or url’s/links) by having the site in 3 locations; Locally, Staging, and Live?

One licence entitles you to one public site. If your staging server is behind a password wall, as it were, that’s fine. Same goes for the local dev setup.

@Ingmar Grell

Ahooy, thanks! This is good to know. Once I push updates from local to remote, what changes will need to be made? I am already assuming the standard change database information. Is there anything else I should keep in mind?

I’ve been knee deep in Wordpress for the past few weeks so I still have that mind set. haha

There is some more info in the wiki. Be sure to check out Deeploy Helper, too.

@Ingmar Greil

Excellent!

There is some more info in the wiki. Be sure to check out Deeploy Helper, too.

steps you will have to do:

Change the themes path under CP > System Preferences > General Configuration
Change the basepath to template file directory
Change these: General Configuration, Weblog Management, File Upload Preferences, Global Weblog Preferences, Membership Preferences, Captcha Preferences, Emoticon Preferences

It looks like Ingmar gave you a good link to read thru.

Ok, ran into a few problems which I believe are just a matter of altering some basic settings.. Could be wrong though. 😊

I’ve copied the remote site to my local environment, exported the db, and have everything running somewhat. Here’s some of the issues I am running into:

• The images are not being loaded from the style sheet. If I look in my “activity” window I notice that it just picking up “http://localhost:8888/images/image.jpg” and not the url/directory name. I have the site setup up in “http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com”

• Also when I visit a page such as say “About Us” with a url of “http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com/about-us/” I get a 404 page. So basically I can only view the homepage. What is even more strange it’s picking up my 404 page template from a Wordpress 404 page which is in a entirely different directory on my local host.

I believe I have my general configuration setting correct, as well as my config file.

Any thoughts?

Sounds like you did not set the url properly in the admin section.  go to admin>sys pref> gneral configuration.  Your site url should be set to http://locallhost/mywebsite.  Also, make sure all of your local folders have the same name as the remote site.

@roi.agneta

Thanks for the reply, I double checked my config panel and all is the way it should it be. I currently have:

URL to the root directory of your site: http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com/

URL to your Control Panel index page: http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com/system/index.php

URL to your “themes” folder: http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com/themes/

Theme Folder Path: /Users/Username/Sites/mywebsite.com/themes/

This all look correct?

I just double checked the “PHP Info” under Admin/Utilities/PHP Info/ and for “_SERVER[“SCRIPT_FILENAME”]” I am getting:

/Users/Username/Sites/mywebsite.com/system/index.php

Is this correct, shouldn’t it be /Users/Username/Sites/mywebsite.com/themes/

That look sOK, but I was looking back an your earlier post about not getting to the “about Us” page.  The url should look like this:

“http://localhost:8888/mywebsite.com/index.php/about-us/”

Enter that manually and see if it takes you to the right place.  Also, can you check your CSS template and look at how the image links are structured?

If I go to that URL I get a 404 page. My URL’s are not fully populating it seems like. My general configuration all seems to be correct. Is there something else I might be missing, any files I should edit? Could something have happened when I exported the DB from the remote site and imported locally?

I am totally stumped… haha

Can you get to the home page on your local site using “http://localhost/mywebsite.com/”