Hi Everyone,
I was wanting to start a discussion on how people manage their dev/test
servers. I'm thinking of changing a few things that I do and thought it
would be worth canvasing for ideas first.
So I'll get the ball rolling.
Firstly I like to develop on my local Windows PC - it's just faster and
easier for chucking files around. So I use wampserver + a paid no-ip
account so I have a domain that points to this server. This means
project managers can look at the site while I'm working on it (via
clientname.mydomain.com) and WAMP is handy in that it lets you run
different versions of PHP/MySQL side by side.
Once the job is ready to show to the client, it goes to a different dev
server on a properly hosted linux box. Git to transfer the files,
database is imported manually. I won't always do this, but it's useful
where the client is likely to take weeks or months to upload content and
approve the work etc. The problem with WAMP is that all the dev sites go
down if I switch php/MySQL versions for a day to work on another
project, which happens quite a bit.
When we go live, we use git to transfer the files to production server
and again move the database + content file uploads manually. Command
line git on the production server is great. I find it very handy for
making little 2 minute tweaks to the live site and then pushing them
back onto the dev server. For larger ongoing changes, I'll do those on
the local wampserver.
I use github for managing the git repos which works well, but the 50
repo limit is going to hit sooner or later (I don't know how pricing
works after 50 repos) so I'm giving thought to self-hosting this. Would
welcome any comments on that.
One thing which is a constant struggle is developing on a dev site with
an outdated database / content files. You can ask for approval just on
the new feature you developed, but the client always comments on product
images missing, or a page having the wrong content etc. I'd be
interested to know how others work around this - perhaps a scripted way
of pulling the database + user files down from production to dev?
Anyway, interested to hear what other people use, and the pros and cons etc.
Harvey.
--
Harvey Kane
Phone:
- Auckland: +64 9 950 4133
- Wanaka: +64 3 746 8133
- Mobile: +64 21 811 951
Email: [email protected]
If you need to contact me urgently, please read my email policy
www.ragepank.com/email/
--
NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug
To post, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe, send email to
[email protected]
