I will try to describe what I'm liiking for as best as I can.
I have a team of developers working on different sites all written with PHP.
For the example, they are now working on a site mysite.com
I want them to have something like a git solution where the master will be the staging area but I will be able to access the different branches and see them.
Let's give an example.
Dan is working on mysite.com
He has a local development environment which he forked from staging.mysite.com (the master).
Dan is creating a branch called dan-branch-1 and another one called dan-branch-2.
Both branches need to be available at the addresses staging.mysite.com/dan/dan-brach-1 and staging.mysite.com/dan/dan-branch-2
When I'm saying available I mean a browsable website so I will have a copy of staging.mysite.com at each of the branches where my client will be able to see the changes we made for him.
After the changes are approved, Dan will merge the branches back to the master.
Finally at some point we will upload the master to the production server.
Is there such a solution that can help me with that?
Thanks !
After a lot of searching I found the exect solution to my issue.
It's called GitLab and it offers everything I looked for.
The interface seems a bit old fashioned, and the learning curve seem steap but it is actually a complete solution so I'm going to learn it and try it.
Netbeans have remote server options.
you can try this.
start netbeans PHP project with remote server access or you can do existing project right click properties and rin configuration give remote server details, FTP, folder path.
if two developer working in same file they have to syncronize manually.
code will merge . No need spend time to merge .
and application will uptodate every time.
thanks..
I'm trying to figure out a way to deploy my company intranet PHP apps automatically, using GitLab, but so far, I'm not sure if the options that I've found on the internet will do the job.
Here's the scenario:
VM1: Remote Git server, that uses GitLab to administrate projects repos.
VM2: Development server. Each project has it's own development server.
VM3: Production server. Each project has it's own, as well.
Developers: Each developer uses a vagrant box, based on the project's development server.
What I want to do:
Whenever a developer push it's commits to the development branch, a hook in the remote server must update the development server tree with the last commit on that branch.
The same must occur when the master branch is updated, but it must update the production server tree.
However, since we use Laravel, we must run some extra console commands using Artisan, depending on each case.
We are following Vincent Driessen's Git Branching Model.
What I know so far:
I know that GitLab uses Web Hooks, but I'm not sure if that's going to work in this case, since I need to access a custom URL, doesn't sound very safe, but if it's the only solution, I can write a script to handle just that.
The other possible solution is to use Jenkins but I'm not an expert and I don't know yet if Jenkins is too much for my case, since I'm not using unit tests yet.
Do you guys have implemented a solution that could help in my case? Can anyone suggest an easy and elegant way to do that?
Thanks guys! Have a nice one
We do it the following way:
Developers checkout whatever Git branches, and as many branches as they want/need locally (Debian in VM Ware on Mac)
All branches get pulled to dev server whenever a change is pushed to Git. They are available in feature-x.dev.domain.com, feature-y.dev.domain.com etc., running against dev database.
Release branches are manually checked out on live system for testing, made available on release-x.test.domain.com etc. against the live database (if possible, depending on migrations).
We've semi-automated this using own scripts.
Database changes are made manually, due the sensitivity of their nature. However, we don't fint that a hassle, after getting used to migrations - and just remembering to note the alterations. We find good support by cloning databases locally for each branch that needs changes. An automated schema comparison quickly helps then, if changes to a migration file have been forgotten.
(The second point is the most productive one, making instant test on the dev platform available to everyone as soon as the first commit of a new branch is pushed)
I would suggest to keep things simple and work with git, hooks and remote repositores.
Pulling out heavy guns, like Jenkins or Gitlab for this task could be a bit too much.
I see your request as the following: "git after push and/or git after merge: push to remote repo".
You could setup "bare" remote repositories - one for "dev-stage", one for "production-stage".
Their only purpose is to receive pushes.
Each developer works on his feature-branch, based on the development branch.
When the feature-branch is ready, it is merge back to the main development branch.
Both trigger a "post merge" or "post-receive" hook, which execute a script.
The executed script can do whatever you want.
(Same approach for production: When the dev-branch has enough new features, it is merged to prod branch - triggers merge event - scripts...)
Here you want two things:
You want to push a specific branch to a specific remote repo.
In order to do this, you have to find out the specific branch in your hook script.
That's tricky, but solveable, see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13057643/1163786 (writing a "git post-receive hook" to deal with a specific branch)
You want to execute additional steps for configuration/setup, like artisan, etc.
You might add these steps directly or as triggers to the hook script.
I think this request is related to internal and external deployment via git.
You might also search for tutorials, like "deployment with git", which might be helpful.
For example: http://ryanflorence.com/deploying-websites-with-a-tiny-git-hook/
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Working-with-Remotes
http://githooks.com/ & https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/githooks.html
If you prefer to keep things straightforward and don't mind using paid third-party options, check out one of these:
http://deploybot.com/
https://www.deployhq.com/
https://envoyer.io/
Alternatively, if you fancy shifting to an integrated solution, I've not used better than Beanstalk.
I have a PHP/Mysql Desktop server. I also installed PHP/Mysql to my laptop and one of my friends for developing a project. Is there anyway that we can synchronise all the changes (i.e. to the php files as well as database changes whether structural or data wise) we do on our laptops to desktop PC ?
For sure you want to start using Git, possibly with a free private repository on somewhere like www.bitbucket.org. Within your versioning, you can backup a version of your SQL inside of the phpMySQL admin tool, and clone the entire repository every time you want to move it.
There are a few choices
https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd#readme
will sync real time and uses inotify
and if you want to go real nerd
http://www.drbd.org/
High availability clustering
The best way would to be purchase a VPS from a company like Digital Ocean for $5.00 a month. You can then setup a MySQL database that you can both easily connect to. In addition, you will be able to use it to test and deploy (smaller) projects to the server.
Forgot to address the other part of your question. You will be able to setup git/SVN/CVS on this server as well. There are good tutorials online for this. You can both access and commit your changes to this repository. You could also use a website like GitHub for this version control.
Probably the easiest way (if you just want the files synced as is on each change) would be to use something like Google Drive or a similar service. Though if you want revision history and more advanced tools, you'd probably need some sort of version control repository (git, svn, etc.).
However, I definitely recommend version control if that works for you. And if you go with git, I highly recommend bitbucket as they have free closed source hosting for projects of up to 10 (last time I checked) people.
Along with a version control system (such as SVN, Git, or Mercurial) you can't go wrong with using a tool such as FreeFileSync (free as in freeware) for a quick and easy way to push the changes you make to a project to a centralized location. With your project included in a VCS repository the VCS you choose to use will give you control over how you want your project to be synchronized.
This has helped me a lot over the years and has even made the process faster.
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.
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.