Thread

When looking for a decent workflow for deploying content from a staging server to a production server, I find lots of questions and not a lot of useful answers. The answers that exist are usually very painful.

Somebody needs to build a module that does this. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have a clue how.

The basic features it needs are:
1. Look for any changes to pages and posts between the staging server and the production server.
2. Give the ability to choose individual pages or posts to sync from staging to production.
3. It would probably also be good to include this functionality for templates for anyone saving their templates in the database.

There are more things it can do, but I don’t think it would be necessary for the module to include file synchronization, as that can be easily handled via rsync scripts. But this would solve the pain point of not being able to easily sync new content.

Anybody know of anyone who might be working on such a thing already? I thought I saw something about one being in development at some point, but I haven’t seen anything since.

It’s ironic isn’t it. EE is a true CMS and you can separate content from presentation. But if you want to work on presentation and update from dev to prod but leave prod content in tact, you can’t. Well, I suppose you can but it’s certainly not a known, is it?

Frankly, at this point, this should be built into EE. The product isn’t being used for some serious stuff and this shouldn’t an MIA feature in 2012.

In short, I agree and feel your pain.

This may not be a direct response, but have you ever looked at Beyond Compare?  It can compare individual files between entire directories and entire directory structures in a flash and allow you to selectively synch them.  This includes directories in a FTP server, so for instance if you have a copy of your server stuff running on localhost and another on a real web server, you can synch them up.

I think the trouble is data. From what I’ve heard, you can use Navicat to merge databases pretty effectively. Also, I’ve heard of people using git to merge DB export files so you can import the merged DB in prod. Sounds scary as hell so I’m not sure if I’ll try it without a proof of concept first.

What would help I think are some simple scripts we can use to migrate schema up the deployment stream to production, while we can just periodically refresh data from production with a simple script of it’s own.

When I used to work at an e-comm company this is how we did it. Essentially migrating certain tables and application infrastructure up to production while content and data came downstream.

If someone did that, life would be a lot easier. I’d have to really wrap my head around the EE DB, but I’m always out of time to do that and end up fashioning some sort of hackish process to update production <-> stage <-> dev.