Pushing local development to production development

[ZionBludd]

Hi All, I am wondering if anyone has come up with an easier way of merging their local environment with the live production environment. 

For instance, my thinking would be to use Site Profile Exporter, install Processwire in the main directory of the live environment & install. Just to clarify, This is if I am doing a lot of structural changes obviously to both the template fields level and the templates themselves. 

Otherwise, it would be just the normal (keeping two copies in sync and uploading etc).  

Does anyone have any solutions? 

[horst]

https://processwire.com/blog/posts/introduction-migrations-module/

 

[thetuningspoon]

For the initial live deployment, we just make a copy of the database on the server, sync the files up, and update the config file to point to the correct database. There's no need to run through the actual installer again.

For ongoing database updates, we usually use PW's import/export functionality for syncing templates and fields, and then have to remember to add any new pages that are needed. But that is not always ideal, so a solution where all DB changes are done by script (as with the migrations module) is probably a better long term approach if you can pull it off. 

[horst]

25 minutes ago, thetuningspoon said:

For the initial live deployment, we just make a copy of the database on the server, sync the files up, and update the config file to point to the correct database. There's no need to run through the actual installer again.

I always do a quick install on unknown servers with the blank site profile, pull in the modules for Diagnostics and the ProcessDatabaseBackup, do a proper check of server, database (charset collations etc.), filesystem, PHP, image support, etc, and if all is well or changed to be well, I install the initial database dump and switch to the site profile.

The times before I switched to that approach, I several times run into issues that could be ommitted with my current approach, and it took me much more time to find out what was not setup right or missing. - Sure, if you already know the server you deploy to, it can be done without the initial install and diagnostics step. But also on a known server, someone may set the wrong database charset, wrong file access rights, or bind a account to the wrong PHP version, or what ever.

Do a fresh install and check with diagnostics modules all together takes 10 minutes max.,  to see if everything is as it should be. ?

[ZionBludd]

Thanks @horst and @thetuningspoon 

[gmclelland]

@horst There's also TracyDebugger's Diagnostics panel https://adrianbj.github.io/TracyDebugger/#/debug-bar?id=diagnostics that you can use.