deploy

Hey Folks,

I've been working on some deploy recipes for Drupal, built upon the great Python tool Fabric. Drush still does most of the heavy lifting, but Fabirc gives me a nice way of putting a several commands together into a single deploy or development workflow command.

I'm packaging these recipes together in a set of modules called Neoprene. It's pretty alpha code at this stage but someone on another group suggested some folks in this channel might find this useful.

https://github.com/scimusmn/neoprene

The lack of a robust content staging solution in Drupal has been long standing. In this post I won't go into details of why this is such a difficult problem to solve. Instead, I'll suggest a plan, to make a plan, to solve it! So, those of you that are interested in tackling a strategically important functionality for Drupal 8, please continue to read.

Kicking off a discussion here surrounding the whole area of content deployment à la Deploy module. I'm starting work on a comprehensive deployment system for a large client and we'll be contributing back our code. I want to try to minimise duplication of efforts by staying in touch with others who are already working on extensions or enhancements to Deploy and related module, so that I can build on existing code and not re-invent the wheel. Heyrocker has told me that he's done a nodequeue deploy module, for example, which is one of the main things we'll need.

Problem

To me a staging server is one where I try new modules, make settings changes, and otherwise screw around with the data structures. A production server holds the content, interacts with my users, etc.

My problem is when I need to create a staging server (by dumping the production server database) it immediately goes out of sync with the production server.

Is there an easy way of finding out what db tables are changed for each module?
I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out how to deploy and maintain my website. The live version is a community website, so users will be adding content. On the development side, I'll be making changes. I need to figure out if there's a way to only deploy the setting changes to the live version, so I don't clobber data the users have added. I'd rather not put the live site into maintenance mode as I fiddle with changes, and I certainly would like to avoid making changes to the live site while its live.