I'm looking for advice on deploying changes to an existing website. First some background; we have dev, test, staging and production servers, each with thier own installation of umbraco thier own databases and thier own files / media.
We've developed a whole bundle of new doc types, new data types, installed new packages etc... all on our dev server, which support a new branch of pages/content. There's also supporting content fragments in another branch.
All this needs to be transfered to the test, staging and production servers. in sequence at the appropriate stage of testing.
We do have courier so we could use this for the content but not for any of the other database changes.
The plan was to create a package from the dev server of everything we'd done and installe it on the other servers.
However there seem to be some problems...
The package tool only lets you package up one branch of content, however I have 2 seperate root level branches I need to go, I suppose I could move one inside the other then un-move it on the destination :-\
I need to move media and don't see a way to do this
no way to include installed packages (easy enough to re-install them all I guess) some of our data types rely on these packages.
I'm sure there are other issues I haven't encountered yet also.
If I'd been a bit better prepared I could have upped the DB seed ID before beginning the new Dev so we could use DB compare tools but I haven't done that :-(
I've faced this problem a few times now, and there's no straight-forward answer - tried different solutions for different clients/sites.
One idea would be to effectively reserve the Courier concept. To push all the content/data from live to your staging environment, so that it "becomes the master" - and then deploy that to replace the live site? Obviously be cautious of overwriting any fresher data on staging.
Going forward on that, we make the data/doc-type changes manually on live (horrid and tiresome), same for media & macros, and then rely on Courier for the content changes.
With hindsight we should have taken the DB seed ID approach for SQL Compare - at least we'll know for next time.
Interested in hearing other dev's solutions to this problem too!
Ok, Here's an update on what I tried so far, what worked and what failed. ( and we've not finished yet )
Creating a package for new doc types works ok if they're all leaf nodes of the doc type tree, if you're adding multiple doc types you need to edit the xml and ensure the root most nodes are in the package.xml file first.
Templates didn't get included correctly in the package.xml so I manually added them (again in the correct order but I'm not sure that was necesary).
My next problem was that every property guid created from my package did not match the properties on my dev server so courier will not work to transfer the content.
I'm not sure if I can specify the guids in the package.xml so the properties on the target have the same guids as the source... but that would be a pretty big job anyway.
I may try install the package on the live server then back it up and restore the DB over dev and test, then re-enter all the content (we only have a skelton so far) then courier should work with all the ids matching.
Deploying changes to an existing website
Hi All,
I'm looking for advice on deploying changes to an existing website. First some background; we have dev, test, staging and production servers, each with thier own installation of umbraco thier own databases and thier own files / media.
We've developed a whole bundle of new doc types, new data types, installed new packages etc... all on our dev server, which support a new branch of pages/content. There's also supporting content fragments in another branch.
All this needs to be transfered to the test, staging and production servers. in sequence at the appropriate stage of testing.
We do have courier so we could use this for the content but not for any of the other database changes.
The plan was to create a package from the dev server of everything we'd done and installe it on the other servers.
However there seem to be some problems...
I'm sure there are other issues I haven't encountered yet also.
If I'd been a bit better prepared I could have upped the DB seed ID before beginning the new Dev so we could use DB compare tools but I haven't done that :-(
Cheers.
Murray.
Hi Murray,
I've faced this problem a few times now, and there's no straight-forward answer - tried different solutions for different clients/sites.
One idea would be to effectively reserve the Courier concept. To push all the content/data from live to your staging environment, so that it "becomes the master" - and then deploy that to replace the live site? Obviously be cautious of overwriting any fresher data on staging.
Going forward on that, we make the data/doc-type changes manually on live (horrid and tiresome), same for media & macros, and then rely on Courier for the content changes.
With hindsight we should have taken the DB seed ID approach for SQL Compare - at least we'll know for next time.
Interested in hearing other dev's solutions to this problem too!
Cheers, Lee.
Ok, Here's an update on what I tried so far, what worked and what failed. ( and we've not finished yet )
Creating a package for new doc types works ok if they're all leaf nodes of the doc type tree, if you're adding multiple doc types you need to edit the xml and ensure the root most nodes are in the package.xml file first.
Templates didn't get included correctly in the package.xml so I manually added them (again in the correct order but I'm not sure that was necesary).
My next problem was that every property guid created from my package did not match the properties on my dev server so courier will not work to transfer the content.
I'm not sure if I can specify the guids in the package.xml so the properties on the target have the same guids as the source... but that would be a pretty big job anyway.
I may try install the package on the live server then back it up and restore the DB over dev and test, then re-enter all the content (we only have a skelton so far) then courier should work with all the ids matching.
@lee the reverse courier... then redploy idea won't work in our scenario as users are adding content all the time.
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