recommended workflow

[Bastien Girschig]

Hello!

I am pretty new to processwire, and trying to find a good workflow with it. This is not specific to PW but I am hoping some of you might still be able to help me out

I am used to having a local copy of whatever I'm working on, then when I'm happy with what I have, deploy it. What I was hoping to do is simply use my prod database (or a staging one) while modifying my template locally. However, this is not allowed by my server (can't connect to database from anywhere except the same server).

Then I thought I might find some sort of sql proxy in php, to override this limitation, but I don't think that's actually possible.

Now what I do is either:

• Delete everything and setup the website again (using site profile exporter). This is a very inefficient process and I hate it
• Use my ftp client to do a quick-edit, one file at a time. This makes it impossible to do source control on my template, and I hate it as well

I'm sure there is a better way...

Thanks !

[bernhard]

Hello Bastien and welcome to the forum,

there's no one single one-click solution for that, but we have several options. Did you already do some research?

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:processwire.com+live+staging

[eelkenet]

Tip: If you install TracyDebugger, you automatically also get Adminer, with which it is very easy to import/export your full database from and to your local/staging server. 

[Bastien Girschig]

@bernhard: Thanks, but I don't think that would work. A staging environment would be helpful but not allow me to work on a local copy, would it ?

@eelkenet: Thanks as well, this looks super useful. I'll check it out

[bernhard]

7 minutes ago, Bastien Girschig said:

@bernhard: Thanks, but I don't think that would work. A staging environment would be helpful but not allow me to work on a local copy, would it ?

Of course it works. If you don't like the wording "staging" you can also google for "migration live" https://www.google.com/search?q=site:processwire.com+migration+live

[Mikie]

What source control do you use? For jobs where client are on shared hosting https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp works really well for basic deployment and even rollbacks if necessary, I can tell you my workflow with it if you'd like but it's pretty simple. 

Re the database, not sure exactly what you are after. If I have ssh access I use a bash script I based off this one https://gist.github.com/samhernandez/25e26269438e4ceaf37f to sync local and remote databases and files. I use it to pull down latest state from the server, but you could also use it to push from local I guess, or sync between staging and live.