I'm updating an existing wordpress site making significant modifications the the theme and site structure, as well as making updates to plugins which in turn store their data into mysql database.
As far as I'm aware there are 2 (3?) possible strategies here:
'Dump-and-load' MySQL database from DEV to LIVE and replace wp-content folder with latest updates.
Import changes via WP-importer and replace wp-content folder with latest updates.
Make database changes manually via WP admin interface and replace wp-content folder with latest updates (this is useful only for minor changes).
While I am developing in my own separate environment this is for an existing website which is currently live and will continue to receive updates from the public such as comments and entries into contact forms, hence I expect the database to be different now from when I release my changes.
Given this the options above provide the following problems.
1. DUMP AND LOAD
The 'dump-and-load' strategy seems to be out of the question as my data is being updated behind the scenes (this would have been my preferred approach as this is easily rolled back).
Result: requires synchronising databases post release to get latest updates, TOO COMPLICATED.
2. USE THE IMPORTER
Using the WP-Importer plugin page and post IDs will get updated, screwing up styling that relies on the post IDs to get activated. This in turn creates a CSS nightmare that I wish to avoid, having to go though the CSS after release to update the new page/post IDs with the ones the database created.
Result: Too finicky, not very professional approach leading to long and complex release process.
3. UPDATE DATABASE MANUALLY
This option is great for small changes but when for more complex releases the list of steps to follow on the PROD interface becomes long and hard to follow, making it easy to make mistakes.
Result: Too easy to screw up, only a last resort.
IS THERE A STANDARD WORDPRESS RELEASE STRATEGY FOR EXISTING WEBSITES?
So basically, my question is: What release process do other wordpress developers follow when UPDATING an existing website? Is there an option that I have not listed below that minimizes hassle and reduces time and complexity during release?
I've set up source control for the site using GIT and I am used to automating things via ANT or similar release script, this may be overkill for the current project but would be ideal to at least know of a simple way to update a wordpress site and minimize the chances of screwing it up.
Thanks!
I don't think this is particular to WordPress, it's a similar situation to any custom site. I personally favor replaying the SQL changes on production that were made on dev. The tricky part is that you have to know what SQL changes were made. For example a certain plugin may make some schema changes when you install it - you need to know what they were. You can do that by creating an export of your DB as SQL before installing a plugin, then take another export after and do a diff on the files.
Since you say you're making the modifications then I might assume you know what SQL changes you are going to make? Just make sure all changes you make to the DB are in the form of SQL script files and not just editing using the GUI (you can use the GUI to help write the queries, but save the actual SQL). After all of your changes are done you should have a bunch of SQL scripts that you ran during your development process - you can re-run them in order without encountering errors.
Then when it's time to push to production, create a staging version of production (that is take a fairly current DB backup of production). Run your update scripts on that and test that everything is ok. If it is, then you can run on production.
definitely make a backup of production before running any changes on it!
The guy behind WordFence was working on a deployment plugin called
Deploymint.
There's a new one called WP Stack.
Metal Toad Media discussed using Capistrano, but that Capistrano isn't specific to WP.
CrowdFavorite launched a service called
RAMP.
Needless to say, you have some other options. If you're making db changes manually make sure you're working with the serialized data effectively. I recommend using Search and Replace DB. WordPress also had a great little trick for changing the site url entirely from the wp-config file.
I assume you have everything running in a test environment. I would then:
Create a new database in your live environment.
Preload it with all content and configurations for the new site.
In your test environment, configure your config.php to point to the new database.
Upload all files to the live server. Upload your config.php last.
This will minimize downtime.
Often after a Drupal (6.x) site is launched, I have people starting to sign up and enter their own content. Whenever there is need for an upgrade, the database on production is copied to dev and then the development is done on dev, later get pushed to staging for client's approval.
When the site is eventually ready to go live, there is a problem. Production server has the latest user inputted content, dev and staging have the latest functionality. Simply overwriting the database on production won't work. What I usually do is to write down what has been done to dev and than follow the steps to go though the implementations again on production. As the system grows bigger, one single mistake on production may cause lost of business. I can't shutdown the site for several hours. I can't tell how many people are using the site at a given time, even so it's impossible to wait for a time where nobody is on the site to make the upgrade.
Has anyone have any good idea?
Thanks in advance.
There are two concepts you need to look into: The first is "Exportables" which is generally a way of exporting all the configuration of a given module. The second is "Features" (terribly named, yes) which is a way of grouping a set of Exportables into a given changeset for version control, updating, deployment, rollback, etc.
For clarification, many modules implement their own "Exportables" methodology what I linked to above was the Exportables module. Here's a wider strategy for it - http://www.sthlmconnection.se/tips-and-tweaks/exportable-configuration-your-drupal-module-ctools
It's the million dollar question: How to transfer code, configuration and content between different Drupal sites? In Drupal, code is stored in files (or at least it should be) while configuration and content are usually in the database.
Taking your code from one server to another isn't that hard, and code has another advantage: it's easy to store and manage in a version control system like SVN or GIT. That's why most solutions focus on taking stuff out of the database and putting it into code.
Already mentioned by CaseySoftware, the Features module is what you need to store configuration in code. Features has a stable release since a couple of weeks and the community seems to agree that Features is the way forward.
Moving content between sites is a little harder, because content can be added or changed on dev, staging and production simultaneously. Exportables is an attempt to solve that, but it's not the only one. Make sure you also check out Deploy and the Features-based UUID Features Integration modules. None of those modules is stable yet and time will tell which one is the best solution.
Thanks for your time.
I am new to Drupal. I am working on a website and lets assume I am testing 10 modules and select that "X" module suits me well. Now I configure this module to my requirements and then see that this suits the project really well. As you know some modules like profile module may have 10's of form fields which can be time taking to do.
So, is there any way that we transfer some file/s from developer machine to Production machine that will set these configuration settings and configured form fields which avoids re-doing the whole thing over again? Why I need this is, I am in East coast and there are couple of developers on west coast with whom I might have to collaborate. So, I am in desperate need of this kinda system.
Take a look at the Strongarm module. Lullabot recently had a blog post on a development workflow that included Strongarm, "Site Development Workflow: Keep it in Code."
The Drupal way is to keep installing modules on top of more modules until your application does what you want.
Strongarm might be the best solution. But you can also write an update hook that sets the values in your variables table. So this way your changes are captured in code.
You'll need to take a look at your variables tables and possibly the admin form in your module to see what values it stores. It kinda sucks that you have to do that.
Writing update hooks is good practice when you're collaborating. It's akin to Ruby on Rails migration technique. I can't remember using the word "akin" before!
See:
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_update_N
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/variable_set
You should also encourage your team to regularly grab a copy of the database from one definitive location so, if you make changes to the schema, it's likely that your team will pick up those changes soon enough (after you've applied them). But that's not really a guarantee. Just a half decent form of risk management.
The deeper I get with Drupal the more I have to make changes to code within other people's modules. These are usually small changes, and so far it doesn't make sense to rewrite the module's functionality for my own needs.
I'm trying not to make any modifications to Drupal core since that just seems like asking for trouble.
But sooner than later, I'm going to need to update these modules with new releases and then repatch my changes back in. How do you stay organized when making these changes, upgrading modules, and re-applying your changes back?
I'm taking as many notes as I can but the spiderweb is growing around me!
Another key is to maintain explicit .patch files for any changes you make, and include documentation with them. If you have to upgrade to a new version of a module, install the clean copy and re-apply the patch. If it doesn't re-apply cleanly, you know you've got a problem.
That's where maintianing your own source tree in SVN/git/etc can be handy.
Do you change the module in a way other people may benefit?
Then send the patch to the module maintainer, so everybody benefits and you don't have the trouble to stay organised.
There is a good discussion in this question.
I particularly like Nick Sergeants article describing a method where you checkout the Drupal sources via CVS and then control your changes and the CVS records using SVN.
You only have the two already mentioned Options.
1.) If your changes can benefit the community then give back and hopefully it will become Part of the next release.
2.) If your changes are to specific and fit only your needs than your only chance to stay organized is setting up your own VCS (e.g. Subversion) and learn to use it properly.. ;)
There are some good infos on using Subversion with drupal on the Drupal.org site.
There is also a new Module available that allow you to capture some features into your own modules (e.g. features (http://drupal.org/project/features)). I have not much experience with it but maybe this is also a solution for you.
The way that Eaton describes above tends to be how we handle the situation for relatively large sites. If you keep a running log of patches, you can always re-create changes.
One of the aspects that seems to be missed in a lot of the "submit back to the community" posts is that just because you submit it back to the community doesn't mean it'll ever get applied. The way we handle this scenario is by keeping an explicit patch file with an indication of what D.O. issue it's related to. In the case where the patch is eventually integrated, you can remove your patch and pat yourself on the back. In the scenario where your patch is never accepted, at least you still have your log.
The book Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) describes workflow and developing sites with cvs/svn from the beginning.
It's only $32 free shipping at amazon right now (as low as $24 used but remember $4 shipping you might as well get it new. I recommend checking your library for it, if they don't have it try inter-library loan. But this book describes exactly what you are seeking, step by step.
From my experience, one of the bigger problems we come across during our webdevelopment process is keeping different setups updated and secure across different servers.
My company has it's own CMS which is currently installed across 100+ servers. At the moment, we use a hack-ish FTP-based approach, combined with upgrade scripts at specific locations to upgrade all of our CMS setups. Efficiently managing these setups becomes increasingly difficult and risky when there are several custom modules involved.
What is the best way to keep multiple setups of a web application secure and up-to-date?
How do you do it?
Are there any specific tips regarding modularity in applications, in order to maintain flexibility towards our clients, but still being able to efficiently manage multiple "branches" of an application?
Some contextual information: we mainly develop on the LAMP-stack. One of the main factors that helps us sell our CMS is that we can plugin pretty much anything our client wants. This can very from 10 to to 10.000 lines of custom code.
A lot of custom work consists of very small pieces of code; managing all these small pieces of code in Subversion seems quite tedious and inefficient to me (since we deliver around 2 websites every week, this would result in a lot of branches).
If there is something I am overlooking, I'd love to hear it from you.
Thanks in advance.
Roundup: first of all, thanks for all of your answers. All of these are really helpful.
I will most likely use a SVN-based approach, which makes benlumley's solution closest to what I will use. Since the answer to this question might differ in other usecases, I will accept the answer with the most votes at the end of the run.
Please examine the answers and vote for the ones that you think have the most added value.
I think using a version control system and "branching" the part of the codes that you have to modify could turn out to be the best approach in terms of robustness and efficiency.
A distributed version system could be best suited to your needs, since it would allow you to update your "core" features seamlessly on different "branches" while keeping some changes local if need be.
Edit: I'm pretty sure that keeping all that up to date with a distributed version system would be far less tedious than what you seem to expect : you can keep the changes you are sure you're never going to need elsewhere local, and the distributed aspect means each of your deployed application is actually independent from the others and only the fix you mean to propagate will propagate.
If customizing your application involves changing many little pieces of code, this may be a sign that your application's design is flawed. Your application should have a set of stable core code, extensibility points for custom libraries to plug into, the ability to change appearance using templates, and the ability to change behavior and install plugins using configuration files. In this way, you don't need a separate SVN branch for every client. Rather, keep the core code and extension plugin libraries in source control as normal. In another repository, create a folder for each client and keep all their templates and configuration files there.
For now, creating SVN branches may be the only solution that helps you keep your sanity. In your current state, it's almost inevitable that you'll make a mistake and mess up a client's site. At least with branches you are guaranteed to have a stable code base for each client. The only gotcha with SVN branches is if you move or rename a file in a branch, it's impossible to merge that change back down to the trunk (you'd have to do it manually).
Good luck!
EDIT: For an example of a well-designed application using all the principles I outlined above, see Magento E-Commerce. Magento is the most powerful, extensible and easy to customize web application I've worked with so far.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me what Aron is after is not version control. Versioning is great, and I'm sure they're using it already, but for managing updates on hundreds of customized installations, you need something else.
I'm thinking something along the lines of a purpose-built package system. You'll want every version of a module to keep track of its individual dependencies and 'guaranteed compatibilities', and use this information to automatically update only the 'safe' modules.
E.g. let's say you've built a new version 3 of your 'Wiki' module. You want to propagate the new version to all the servers running your application, but you've made changes to one of the interfaces within the Wiki module since version 2. Now, for all default installations, that is no problem, but it would break installations with custom extensions on top of the old interface. A well-planned package system would take care of this.
To address the security question, you should look into using digital signatures on your patches. There are lots of good libraries available for public-key-based signatures, so just go with whatever seems to be the standard for your chosen platform.
Not sure whether someone's said this, there are a lot of long responses here, and I've not read them all.
I think a better approach to your version control would be to have your CMS sat on its own in its own repository and each project in its own. (or, all of these could be subfolders within one repo i guess)
You can then use its trunk (or a specific branch/tag if you prefer) as an svn:external in each project that requires it. This way, any updates you make to the CMS can be committed back to its repository, and will be pulled into other projects as and when they are svn updated (or the external is svn:switch 'ed).
As part of making this easier, you will need to make sure the CMS and the custom functionality sit in different folders, so that svn externals works properly.
IE:
project
project/cms <-- cms here, via svn external
project/lib <-- custom bits here
project/www <-- folder to point apache/iis at
(you could have cms and lib under the www folder if needed)
This will let you branch/tag each project as you wish. You can also switch the svn:external location on a per branch/tag basis.
In terms of getting changes live, I'd suggest that you immediately get rid of ftp and use rsync or svn checkout/exports. Both work well, the choice is up to you.
I've got most experience with the rsync route, rsyncing an svn export to the server. If you go down this route, write some shell scripts, and you can create a test shell script to show you the files it will upload without uploading them as well, using the -n flag. I generally use a pair of scripts for each environment - one a test, and one to actually do it.
Shared key authentication so you don't need a password to send uploads up may also be useful, depending on how secure the server to be given the access is.
You could also maintain another shell script for doing bulk upgrades, which simply calls the relevant shell script for each project you want to upgrade.
Have you looked at Drupal? No, not to deploy and replace what you have, but to see how they handle customizations and site-specific modules?
Basically, there's a "sites" folder which has a directory for every site you're hosting. Within each folder is a separate settings.php which allows you to specify a different database. Finally, you can (optionally) have "themes" and "modules" folders within sites.
This allows you to do site-specific customizations of particular modules and limit certain modules to those sites. As a result, you end up with a site that the vast majority of everything is perfectly identical and only the differences get duplicated. Combine that with the way it handles upgrades and updates and you might have a viable model.
Build into the code a self-updating process.
It will check for updates and run them when/where/how you have configured it for the client.
You will have to create some sort of a list of modules (custom or not) that need to be tested with the new build prior to roll-out. When deploying an update you will have to ensure these are tested and integrated correctly. Hopefully your design can handle this.
Updates are ideally a few key steps.
a) Backup so you can back out. You should be able to back out
the entire update at any time. So,
that means creating a local archive
of the application and database
first.
b) Update Monitoring Process - Have the CMS system phone home to look for a new build.
c) Schedule Update on availability - Chances are you don't want the update to run the second it is available. This means you will have to create a cron/agent of some kind to do the system update automatically in the middle of the night. You can also consider client requirements to update on weekends, or on specific days. You can also stagger rolling out your updates so you don't update 1000 clients in 1 day and get tech support hell. Staggered roll-out of some kind might be beneficial for you.
d) Add maintenance mode to update the site -- Kick the site into maintenance mode.
e) SVN checkout or downloadable packages -- ideally you can deploy via svn checkout, and if not, setup your server to deliver svn generated packages into an archive that can be deployed on client sites.
f) Deploy DB Scripts - Backup the databases, update them, populate them
g) Update site code - All this work for one step.
h) Run some tests on it. If your code has self-tests built in, it would be ideal.
Here's what I do...
Client-specific include path
Shared, common code is in shared/current_version/lib/
Site specific code is in clients/foo.com/lib
The include path is set to include from the clients/foo.com/lib, and then share/lib
The whole thing is in a version control system
This ensures that the code uses shared files wherever possible, but if I need to override a particular class or file for some reason, I can write a client specific version in their folder.
Alias common files
My virtual host configuration will contain a line like
Alias /common <path>/shared/current_version/public_html/common
Which allows common UI elements, icons, etc to be shared across projects
Tag the common code with each site release
After each site release, I tag the common code by creating a branch to effectively freeze that point in time. This allows me to deploy /shared/version_xyz/ to the live server. Then I can have a virtual host use a particular version of the common files, or leave it pointing at the current_version if I want it to pick up the latest updates.
Have you looked at tools such as Puppet (for system administration incl. app deployment) or Capistrano (deployment of apps in RubyOnRails but not limited to these)?
One option would be to set up a read-only version control system (Subversion). You could integrate access to the repository into your CMS and invoke the updates through a menu, or automatically if you do not want the user to have a choice about an update (could be critical). Using a version control system would also allow you to keep different branches easily
As people have already mentioned that using version control (I prefer Subversion due to functionality) and branching would be the best option. Another open source software available on sourceforge called cruisecontrol. Its amazing, you configure cruisecontrol with subversion in sach a way that any code modification or new code added in serversion, Cruise control will know automatically and will do build for you. It will save your hell of time.
I have done the same way in my company. we have four projects and have to deploy that project on different servers. I have setup cruiseconrol in such a way that any modification in code base triggers automatic build. and another script will deploy that build on the server. your are good to go.
If you use a LAMP stack I would definitely turn the solutions files into a package of your distribution and use it for propagate changes. I recommend for that matter Redhat/Fedora because of RPM and it's what I have experience on. Anyway you can use any Debian based distribution too.
Sometime ago I made a LAMP solution for managing an ISP hosting servers. They had multiple servers to take care of web hosting and I needed a way to deploy the changes of my manager, because every machine was self-contained and had a online manager. I made a RPM package containing the solution files (php mostly) and some deploying scripts that runned with the RPM.
For automated updating we had our own RPM repository set on every server in yum.conf. I set an crontab job to update the servers daily with the latest RPMs from that trusted repository.
Trustiness can be achieve too because you can use trust settings in the RPM packages, like signing them with your public key file and accepting only signed packages.
Hm could it be an idea to add configuration files? You wrote that a lot of small script are doing something. Now if you'd build them into the sources and steered them with configuration files shouldn't that "ease" that?
On the other hand having branches for every customer looks like an exponential growth to me. And how would you "know" which areas you've done something and do not forget to "make" changes in all other branches also. That looks quite ugly to me.
It seems a combination of revision controls, configuration options and/or deployment receipts seems to be a "good" idea.....
With that many variations on your core software, I think you really need a version control system to stay on top of pushing updates from the trunk to the individual client sites.
So if you think Subversion would be tedious, you've got a good sense for what the pain points will be... Personally, I wouldn't recommend Subversion for this, since it's not really that good at managing & tracking branches. Although benlumley's suggestion to use externals for your core software is a good one, this breaks down if you need to tweak the core code for your client sites.
Look into Git for version control, it's built for branching, and it's fast.
Check out Capistrano for managing your deployments. It's a ruby script, often used with Rails, but it can be used for all sorts of file management on remote servers, even non-ruby sites. It can get the content to the remote end through various stragegies including ftp, scp, rsync, as well as automatically checking out the latest version from your repository. The nice features it provides include callback hooks for every step of the deploy process (e.g. so you can copy your site-specific configuration files which might not be in version control), and a release log system--done through symlinks--so you can quickly roll back to a previous release in case of trouble.
I'd recommend a config file with the list of branches and their hosted location, then run through that with a script that checks out each branch in turn and uploads the latest changes. This could be cron'd to do nightly updates automatically.