Posted by myke on May 6, 2010 at 6:52pm
I would like to start a discussion about staging in Drupal 8...
By staging, I mean having a test site, where you can make changes and test them out, before pushing them to the production site and making them live for everybody.
I would also like to see a system where certain data could be marked in the test site, to NOT be pushed to the main site.. this could be used for frequently changing tables, like product orders, forum posts/comments, webforms filled out, etc. and have it run the updates for these tables on the production site, NOT copying it from the test site, so as to avoid problems with tables getting out of sync during staging, and avoid the loss of new information.
Comments
crosspost and deploy module
Hi Myke -
Might be prudent to peruse and/or crosspost this to these groups as well if you want to get some attention from the folks who are working on these sorts of things:
http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2006-import-export-api
http://groups.drupal.org/packaging-deployment
And also, you might want to look at Deploy module, which does a lot of this. http://drupal.org/project/deploy
Agreed with @myke. Staging is
Agreed with @myke. Staging is the last piece to make Drupal all rounded, and it needs not only a contributed module, but support from core.
Joetsui's blog
Staging support in core
I did take a look at the deploy module, and it seems to be a step in the right direction... (Transferring dependencies with the data, etc.)
What I think it will take, is for the production site to have database access to the test/dev site, as well as possibly ftp or otherwise have file system access, so it can copy all of the database and production site into the test/dev site.... grabbing a clean copy of the production site in one operation... Then you could make changes to the test/dev site, and push them back to the main site after they have been tested on a copy of the site... I think it needs to sync in each direction, but intelligently... from production to development site, it grabs everything, but from development to production site, it only grabs data that wouldn't have changed on the production site, such as orders, etc.
-Myke
As mentioned here :
As mentioned here : http://groups.drupal.org/node/60838#comment-202818
I'm working on a new staging solution. Since the first post, I have done a lot of progress.
Soon (today) I will post some explanations about my experiments. I think it can be useful.
A module will be published. It's not "the" solution, but it can provide some useful information about internal DB structure and how to do a staging automatically.
I have used it in real life for a real delivery process. It's working well with some limitation though.
Limitations
What limitations are you running into...?
-Myke