Posted by Anonymous on March 16, 2009 at 11:55am
Hi everybody,
I wanted to ping the group regarding "best practice" or advice on building a new site that will replace our current K12 District site. Do you think it is best to build it local on say a laptop using wampserver and then migrate it over to a host and how hard is this? Or....install it on a spare server I have in our server room using a temp domain name and then migrate it over to a host (again how difficult is the migration process). Looking for advice from all of you who I am sure have done this many times or at least once and what strategy you recommend. Thanks!!
Comments
I Did Both
Not sure of a "best practice" as I've only been at this a couple months (on weekends mostly). Since I needed to get a quick start I choose to build my first site on a pre-production server rather than a local dev/test environment. I have since ported the pre-production code and database back to a localhost dev environment and am now working in a more-or-less circular cycle of...
develop local -> test local -> copy to stable local repository -> copy to pre-production -> test pre-production -> copy to stable pre-production repository
Seems to be working but it took quite a bit of effort to get it in-sync the first time. In particular I've started using the "Backup and Migrate" module on both ends for copying the database. Currently using a commercial file synchronization app to take care of the code migrations.
The one real advantage I've found to this approach is that I'm able to have district personnel entering some of the site content for me (in the pre-production copy). Yes, we've had to re-enter some things as structure is still changing but all-in-all I think it's worked out nicely.
Mark
Mark
This is what I do all the
This is what I do all the time. The migration process is relatively straight forward. Copy the files, create a dump of the database (suggestion: use mysqldump rather than Phpmyadmin for the dump) and move everything to your production server. Very straight forward process.
JS Files Migration?
I know this is entirely the wrong place for this and a just a little off-topic (but I have a hunch dwees may know the answer to this so here we go)...
My sites all generate on-the-fly javascript files that deposit into the file system at sites//files/js. I opened one up and find that they are obviously jQuery products. Can anybody offer a very brief explanation of what these do? More to the point, do these files need to be migrated from development to production or vis-versa?
I read somewhere that these are server-specific so I expect maybe they don't need to be (or shouldn't be?) synchronized with the rest of the code?
Mark
Mark
Are the files all named as a
Are the files all named as a LongRandomString.js? If you have caching turned on, drupal will store the compressed js files in this directory. You should not need to migrate these. They should be regenerated if not found.
Yes, and Thank You
Yep, LongRandomString.js are the files in question and your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks!
Mark
Mark
MySQLDumper for backups
A great tool for doing backups, restores and migration of MySQL databases: http://mysqldumper.de/en/
Frank
My LinkedIn profile
I just use mysqldump on the
I just use mysqldump on the command line for dumping the database, and mysql for importing a database from another computer. The documentation for using it is all easy to find online, and the only caveat I found was that I needed to manually adjust my PATH environmental variable to include the /bin folder of the mysql executables.
MAMP to LAMP
Will I experience any problems if transfer a Drupal site developed on a MAMP server and place it on a LAMP server?
I do it all the time
I do it all the time, no real problems.
Mamp 2 Lamp
If you follow all best-practices (install new things in the sites/all folder etc), then you should have no problem.
Simply:
1). Back up your database and restore it
2). Copy the sites/all files over into a fresh drupal install
3). Change any server names that may change (because of the new server), I'd love to give more detail on this, but I've only done it once.
Mamp 2 Lamp
Thanks cheezItMan -- I won't wait for our Linux server. Here I go... jumping into my first Drupal project! Keep your fingers crossed.
MAMP ok but LAMP is crashing
I've developed a site on my MAMP install, which is working nicely. However I've been trying to install it on my LAMP server and when you navigate to the admin/modules page the drupal site crashes and returns a blank white screen.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I'll post when I find out what's causing the problems. This is the first time I've had any problems while developing on MAMP and migrating to LAMP.
Thanks to all who replied to
Thanks to all who replied to my original post. I appreciate all the helpful advice.
The actual problem was a timeout issue on the server I was using.
A very useful page was "The White Screen of Death (Completely Blank Page)" at http://drupal.org/node/158043
Enabling error reporting (as well as watching your error logs) came in very handy. Immediately I saw an error relating to timeout issues.
The max_execution_time for php on that server was set at 30. I set it to 60 and the problem disappeared (took about 40 seconds to render... pretty slow eh?). That server is clearly pretty slow, but at least my drupal site works now. :)
re: MAMP ok but LAMP is crashing
I believe you have a memory issue. See: http://drupal.org/node/76156
How do you start a new thread?
How do you start a new thread? I don't see any button for such a move....
White Screen of Death (WSOD)
The original Troubleshooting FAQ's are here: http://drupal.org/Troubleshooting-FAQ
We have been working on reorganizing the FAQ's for D7 install and they are here: http://drupal.org/node/540248
After today (Sept 1), we will start migrating the d7 installation pages to the handbook so the final url may change.
Try the node 540248 first and see if it is easier to use.