The ol' Development / Staging / Production server issue!

Posted by frankdesign on April 17, 2013 at 4:52pm

I now have a few Drupal sites under my belt and I'm trying to get my set-up a bit more streamlined for the future. I'm just wondering what way you have your Development / Staging / Production servers set-up. While I guess that you have the Development set-up on MAMP/XAMMP, what do you do for the Staging and Production servers. Do you have them on separate web servers or do you have them the same web server? If they are on the same server - what way do you set them up? I'm guessing Multi site is not a runner - specifically in the case of testing updates to Drupal Core before applying them on the live site.

Also, does anyone have a recommendation for WebHosts that are specifically well tuned for Drupal sites?

Thanks

Comments

Did you have a look at

Posted by mobcdi on April 17, 2013 at 5:01pm

Did you have a look at https://www.getpantheon.com/

I love Codero for hosting --

Posted by aacraig on April 17, 2013 at 6:43pm

I love Codero for hosting -- not that they are Drupal specific, but the customer support is great.

My particular set up has always been to have a developer version of the site locally, and then the staging and production versions on the same machine. If you split the two, make sure both machines have the exact same OS environment, as this avoids problems with different library versions causing headaches.

However, I found that hosting both on the same machine is not a problem.

As far as setup goes, the cleanest thing is to have two separate installations (see git advice below) and host them on separate domains, so
http://example.com - live site
http://staging.example.com - staging site

This also allows you to keep the databases separate. You can easily set this up by configuring your server -- in effect, as far as Apache or Nginx is concerned, they are two distinct web sites.

It goes without saying that using git and a good branching system makes keeping the various instances easily managed. Something like:
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Of course, you'll want to use Features to make it easy to migrate db changes from one instance to the other.

Aaron Craig
http://about.me/aaron.craig