I'm just trying to find an easier way to deploy a site I'm working on. I'm working alone with a test a production server and right now deployment means copying a subset of the files and database data onto my computer and uploading it to the prod site. I'm sure there's a simple synchronization tool out there but so far I've had no luck in finding anything.
What I'd really like is an application I can run locally (on windows) or something I could install on my server for let me have a one-click deployment. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
godwin
Edit
I have decided for now to go with GoodSync and Toad. Thanks for the suggestions.
man scp
SCP(1) BSD General Commands Manual SCP(1)
NAME
scp - secure copy (remote file copy program)
SYNOPSIS
scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file] [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program] [[user#]host1:]file1
[...] [[user#]host2:]file2
DESCRIPTION
scp copies files between hosts on a network. It uses ssh(1) for data transfer, and uses the same authentication and provides the same
security as ssh(1). Unlike rcp(1), scp will ask for passwords or passphrases if they are needed for authentication.
Any file name may contain a host and user specification to indicate that the file is to be copied to/from that host. Copies between two
remote hosts are permitted.
When copying a source file to a target file which already exists, scp will replace the contents of the target file (keeping the inode).
If the target file does not yet exist, an empty file with the target file name is created, then filled with the source file contents. No
attempt is made at "near-atomic" transfer using temporary files.
The options are as follows:
-1 Forces scp to use protocol 1.
-2 Forces scp to use protocol 2.
...
I use GoodSync http://www.goodsync.com/ for this sort of thing. It's really good. Runs on windows, can sync between any combination of local files (S)FTP, windows, linux network shares etc.
Then create a scheduled task/cronjob to run an export of the database into the syncronised folder and have one do an import at the other end. Obviously this process is one way.
http://www.phing.info/docs/guide/stable/
PHing is an automated build system made for PHP. Works with GIT, SVN, PHPUnit, etc...
You basically set up XML files that give PHing instructions on what to do. Allows you to run test suites along with build creation, build multiple varied versions at a time, copy files as well as db, and a bunch of other cool features.
Also, it's open source and platform independent.
What are you using for source control? Some tools like Git and SVN have ready-made methods for this sort of thing. See here for a quick Git solution.
I would second the advice about Git/SVN, but would put in a strong plug for Git via GitHub. Use GitHub as your "central" Git repository. Your local Git repository will push to GitHub, and your production server will pull from GitHub.
There is some overhead to learning Git/GitHub, but really, in the situation you've described (a single engineer and two servers), Git isn't any more complicated then SVN (or CVS or anything else).
We use an FTP Synchronizer, which seems to work pretty well. I don't know offhand of any good free ones.
Example: http://www.ftpsynchronizer.com/
Depends on what type of server you are running, but you could run SVN (Subversion). There is a plugin for Eclipse, Aptana, and Zend Studio if you use that to develop.
Essentially you could have a development repository that sits on the server. You would pull your code down to your local environment and commit it back after changes. Then you can setup another repository that is your live data or production thats linked back to your Development repository.
When you want to update the live data, you just update it so if any trouble happens you can roll back that code without having to roll back your development code. Once you get good at all that you can start branching and tagging your projects.
I personally use both SVN and Git, but I prefer Git because it works so much better. Though if you are using Windows, the command line tools just aren't the same as linux.
Related
I know this has been asked before, but I couldn't get the answer I needed.
Currently I'm developing an website using PHP and was using Notepad++ before, and it all worked well because I'm developing with a co-worker so we both keep on changing different files on the FTP.
Switched to NetBeans. All went ok, pulled the entire website via FTP to my local computer and everytime I edited a file and saved it uploaded to the FTP. But, there is a problem. If my colleague updates a file, it doesn't update on my local folder. So, I thought: "Let's try versioning".
Created a team on bitbucket, created a repository. All went ok.
But now, I'm in a struggle to get everything up and running on both NetBeans (mine and colleague's) so that my colleague is editing a file on his NetBeans and constantly saving so that it gets saved on FTP and only when he stops working on that file push it to BitBucket so that I can pull after.
Suggestions?
About setting up your work environment :
In order to set up your bitbucket repository and local clone, go read this link (official doc).
You will need to repeat the cloning part once for each PC (e.g : once on yours, once on your colleague's).
Read the account management part to see how you can tag your actions with your account, and your colleague's action with his own account.
Start using your git workflow ; when you are tired of always typing your password to upload modifications to your bitbucket account, take the time to read the ssh keys setup part - read carefully, you will need to execute the procedure once for you and once for your colleague.
Using your local git repository with Netbeans is pretty straightforward :
From netbeans, run the File > New Project ... command (default: Ctrl+Shift+N),
Select PHP application with Existing Sources and click Next >,
For the Sources Folder: line, select your local git directory,
Fill the remaining fields, and if you want the last Run configuration screen, then click Finish.
After the project is created in netbeans, you can modify the Run configuration part by right clicking on the project's icon, selecting the Properties menu entry, and going to the Run configuration item.
About solving your workflow "problem" :
Your current FTP workflow can lead you to blindly squash your colleague's modifications (when uploading), or have your colleague's modification blindly squash your own local modifications (when downloading). This is bad, and you will generally notice it only after the bad stuff happened - too late.
Correctly using version control allows you to be warned when this could potentially happen, and to keep an almost infinite undo stack on the modifications of the project's files. The cost, however, is that both of you will have to add several actions in your day to day workflow - some choices can not be made automatically.
You may find it cumbersome in the beginning, but it really pays off, and quite quickly - we're talking big bucks here. So use it and learn.
On top of using Ctrl+S to save your modifications on disk, you and your colleague will need to integrate 3 extra commands in your daily work :
Save your work to your local repository (git add / git commit)
Download the latest modifications shared by your colleague (git pull)
Upload your work to the central repository (git push)
You can access these commands :
from a terminal,
from a GUI frontend : you can try TortoiseGit for windows, or gitk for linux,
from Netbeans :
in the contextual menu of the files/folders in the project tree (right click on the item, there is a "Git" entry),
using the Team > Git > ... menu
Since you provided a git tag, I'll describe what's to do for Git.
set up a remote bare repo on a server that you both could access (BitBucket in your case):
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server
you both clone that remote repo to your local machines:
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Getting-a-Git-Repository#Cloning-an-Existing-Repository
each of you works in her part of the application. When one is done, publish the work to the server:
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Working-with-Remotes#Pushing-to-Your-Remotes
By now, the remote server holds the version that was just pushed. What's missing is the deployment of the website. This has been discussed here:
Using GIT to deploy website
Doing so, you will decouple your work from that of your colleague since you're not changing files over FTP all the time. You work in your part, your partner works on her part. The work is getting merged and then a new version of the website gets published.
You can create git or Mercurial repositories in Atlassian Bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org). If your team is new to version control, i advise you no forks in your first project.
The easy solution ins to use Atlassian SourceTree (http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) to control your code since there is a bug in netbeans. See NetBeans + Git on BitBucket
You need to create a new repository in bitbucket. I assume you already configure the ssh2 keys. Using Git you need:
git clone --bare --shared php_project php_project.git
git commit
Using Mercurial you need:
hg init
hg commit
Good luck / boa sorte
Pedro
I'm developing web app using CodeIgniter PHP framework. The server I'm working with does not support any type of source control (i.e. Subversion) unless you go to a higher price tier.
I would still like to put the code under some sort of source control. Does it make sense to do the following:
Install git or SVN on my local machine and develop there
Copy changes from my local machine to development directory on the server (using FileZilla, WinSCP, etc.) and test
Copy changes from development directory to production directory on the server
Does that sound reasonable? Are there better alternatives? Thanks!
If you are using svn locally it's a bit dangerous because then you will need to protect also your computer - I think the best way is to work with the commercial sites offer fully supported svn/git - like http://www.beanstalkapp.com/ or http://www.github.com
You could use source control on your local machine (SVN, Git, etc.) and use an open source tool like Capistrano to deploy the code from your local source control repo to your server via SSH. Or if you're limited to FTP, this blog post has a potential solution.
An advantage of using a tool like Capistrano instead of directly mirroring the files on your local machine to the server via FileZilla or WinSCP is that Capistrano will version your deployed files so that, if you end up breaking something and need to roll back quickly to the previously-deployed version, it can be as easy as changing a symlink to the previous deployment directory.
Does that sound reasonable?
Partially, in p.1. But even in this case I'll suggest to have your repository also at some Repository-Hosting (BitBucket, GitHub, Assembla)
For pp. 2-3: your deploys must to be automatic and non-interactive, thus - you'll have to select another tools (for using in post-commit hook of SCM-of-choice)
Somehow better alternative to 2-3 may be:
Use 2 different branches (DEVEL and PROD) as sources of DEVEL and PROD dir
Post-commit hook, which upload only changed in committed revision files to corresponding dir (NCFTP for FTP, SCP with scenario for ssh)
Main development happens in DEVEL branch
PROD have only mergesets from DEVEL
Workflow is SCM-agnostic and scalable to any reasonable amount of branches and developers
I'm looking for an editor that can read and write remote PHP files via sFTP. I'm talking about not having a local copy of my PHP files.
But here is the tricky part : I'd like that editor to be aware of all the files in my projet, and provide me with intellisense-like auto-completion, classes structures, etc...Just like Eclipse PDT, Aptana and NetBeans do, but with the "remote project storage and awareness" feature.
Do you know about any editor with these features ?
Thanks !
Edit : I'm absolutely not working on my production server, but on a development server. It's mostly because I need to works under windows on my desktop PC and don't want host my projects locally for various compatibility and tools availability reasons, and use linux as a server OS.
May not be a good idea:
Warnings:
1) Disconnect:
What if you are coding and your connection gets lost, you may get a corrupted file or loose some work. Disconnects occur much more often that power loss in your home/office, and you can safeguard by using a small UPC - that will give a minute to save your work.
2) SCM:
Use git, mercurial, svn or what have you, to speed up deployment. Increases ability to share code, backup and roll backs.
3) Auto completion will not work very well over network connection, because ( at least in NetBeans) it scans your project to figure out what you want to auto-complete. It takes a few seconds even on a local machine.
Solution:
If after all of the above you still want to do it, you can trick your editor by mounting remote storage as a local drive. You didn't specify your OS but on Mac and Linux - you can easily do it - take a look at Fuse. http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
Khmm apperatnly there was an attempt to port Fuse to Windows:
http://fuse4win.4host.ru/
Hope that helps
Update
There are also a few commercial products - one was recommended by macworld I think ( they are both for Mac and Windows)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDrive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpanDrive
On Windows the Zeus editor can do seamless ftp/sftp editing.
These remote ftp files can also be defined to belong to a project/workspace.
But the Zeus PHP intellisensing will only work for local files.
You can use NetBeans for this, you will have your project saved locally but you can set to upload the file anytime when you save that file. Right click on your project, Properties, Run Configuration, Run As: Remote website. Click on Remote Connection: ... Manage and add your FTP account. Don't forget to set Upload files: to On Save. I have had no problem with this configuration and I am working for one year with NetBeans.
For quick editing I am using PSPad.
I don't think this is something that actually exists. Mainly because intellisense and class structures rely on being able to parse your complete project. Doing this over FTP would take way to long to actually be of any practical use.
You might be able to find an editor that will automatically upload any change you make locally though.
I'd second the comments about not working directly on your live environment.
As you've mentioned Eclipse / Aptana - perhaps consider using something like Git or SVN, with a post-commit hook to immediately publish to your live environment each time you commit. That way you reduce the risk by being able to easily roll back any changes that break your live server.
You can use Eclipse (with suitable git/svn plugin) to check out your entire site direct from the repository, and have all the code completion goodness you need. "Saving" is then just a case of committing your changes back to the repository, which would automatically update your server thanks to the post-commit hook.
It's still not ideal, and very risky to develop on a live server, but if you really have no preview environment, then this is perhaps slightly safer than simply working directly through ftp.
I'm curious why you'd need to not keep a local copy - yet you've said the project seems quite small - perhaps taking another approach to the problem would be safer?
There's another post on SO relating to .NET -- not us. Pure PHP. Trying to find the best way/process to deploy stable version of our PHP app. I've seen an article on Capistrano, but am curious what else is out there. Aside from the obvious reasons, I'm also looking to add some scripting so that the SVN rev number gets added in there as well.
Much thanks.
I've used a home-grown script for quite some time. It will (based on an application configuration file):
Run svn export on the repository based on a tag.
Package the export into a tar or zip file, which includes the tag in the name.
Use scp to copy the package to the appropriate server (QA or release).
Connect to the server with ssh to install the package and run post-install scripts.
The application configuration file is part of the project. It can tell the script (at step 2) to strip paths and otherwise process specified files. It also specifies server names and how to handle externals.
I've recently migrated the script to support Git as well as Subversion. I'm also probably going to migrate it to PHP since we're now running in a mixed (Linux and Windows) set up, with Linux now in the minority.
I have plans to automatically call the script with post-commit hooks, but haven't had the need to implement that just yet.
Coincidentally, I was just reading about an Apache Ant/gnu make like build tool called Phing. What I like about it is the ability to write custom extensions in PHP!
I don't know if it works for deploying an app live, but phpUnderControl is a continuous integration suite (which I'm just now starting to look into). If it doesn't support doing deployments natively, it can probably be extended to do them.
Chris Hartjes has a nice view on this: Deployment is not a 4 letter word
We're using Webistrano, which is a web frontend for Capistrano, to deploy a few dozen projects. It's built as a Ruby on Rails app, and provides a nice, centralized and consistent user interface for Capistrano deployments.
Instead of having cap recipes in every project, and running command-line tools, Webistrano stores the recipes in its database, and allows you to attach the recipes to multiple projects and stages. This reduces duplication of scripts.
Also nice is that all deployment logs are stored so there's an auditing trail. Who deployed which revision to the live server, that sort of thing.
As you requested, the Revision number is stored in the deployed project as well.
All in all, we're very pleased with it.
I've always just FTPed files down from sites, edited them and put them back up when creating sites, but feel it's worth learning to do things properly.
I've just commited everything to a SVN repo, and have tried sshing into the server and checking out a tagged build, as well as updating that build using switch.
All good, but it's a lot lot slower than my current process.
What's the best way to set something like this up? Most of my time is just bug fixes or small changes rather than large rewrites, so I'm frequently updating things.
You don't necessarily need to use SVN to deploy the files to the server. Keep using FTP for that and just use SVN for revision history.
You should look at installing rsync to upload changes to your server.
Rsync is great because it compares your local copy of the repo to the copy that's currently on the server and then only sends files that have changed.
This saves you having to remember every file that you changed and selecting them manually to FTP, or having to upload your whole local copy to the server again (and leaving FTP to do the comparisons).
Rsync also lets you exclude files/folder (i.e. .svn/ folders) when syncing between your servers.
I'd recommend you keep using Subversion to track all changes, even bug fixes. When you wish to deploy to your production server, you should use SSH and call svn update. This process can be automated using Capistrano, meaning that you can sit at your local box and call cap deploy -- Capistrano will SSH into your server and perform the Subversion update. Saves a lot of tedious manual labor.
For quick updates I just run svn update from the server.
Sometimes for really really quick updates I edit the files using vim and commit them from the server.
It's not very proper, but quick and quite reliable.
If you want to do this properly, you should definitely look into setting up a local SVN repository. I would also highly recommend setting up a continuous integration (CI) server such as cruise control, which would automatically run any tests against your PHP code when ever you check in to svn. Your CI server could also be used to publish your files via FTP to your host at the click of a button, once it has passed the tests.
Although this sounds like a lot of work, it really isn't and the benefits of a smooth deployment process will more than pay for itself in the long run.
For my projects, I usually have a repo. On my laptop is a working copy, and the live website is a working copy. I make my changes on the local copy, using my local webserver. When everything is tested and ready to go, I commit the changes, then I ssh into the remote server and svn update.
I also keep a folder in this repository which contains sql files of any changes I've made to the database structure, labelled according to their revision number. For instance, when I commit Revision 74 and it has a couple extra columns in one of the tables, included in the commit will be dbupdates/rev74.sql. That way, after I do my svn update, all I just have to run my sql file (mysql db_name -p -u username < dbupdates/rev74.sql) and I'm good to go.
If you want to get real funky with it, you could use a build script to get the current version from SVN, then compile your PHP code, then on a successful build, automatically push the changes to your server.
This will help in debugging and may make your code run faster. Also, getting into the build habit has really improved my coding over just pushing the PHP straight to the server and debugging via Firefox.
The benefits of source control reveal themselves as the complexity of the project and number of developers increase. If you are working directly on a remote server, and are only making quick patches most of the time, source control might not be worth the effort to you.
Preferably, you should be working from a local working copy of the repository (meaning you should also set up a local server). Working against a remote server using SVN as the only means to update it would slow you down quite considerably.
Having said that, working with SVN (or any other source control) will yield many benefits in the long run - you have a complete history of changes, you can always be sure the server is up-to-date (if you ran update) and if you add more developers to the project you can avoid costly source overwrites from each other.
What I do at work, is use FTP to upload changes to a test server. Then when I am finished with the section of the site that I was working on, I commit the changes and update both. Sometimes, if I am working on something and I change a lot of files in different directories, I commit it and update the test server. But I don't update the production server. But I am the only programmer here, I wouldn't recommend committing possibally buggy code if there is more than one programmer.
I use ZendStudio for Eclipse (currently version 6.1). And I use SVN to keep my source codes available. Initially I thought the process was somewhat slow due to commit process (and entering commit comment) and wait until it stops.
However after learning that Ctrl+Alt+C to Commit and check 'Always run in Background', the process doesn't slow at all.
Plus, I do run everything locally, then only SSH after a while.
I did a post-commit hook to automatically update my web. It´s fast but you can make mistakes.
IF on a *nix server AND you have the appropriate SSH access AND you have space to keep multiple copies of the website, THEN the single most useful versioning technique I have found is to use a symbolic link to point to the "current" version of the website. (You can still use SVN to version source code -- this is a way to easily/instantly switch between versions of the website on the server.)
Set up the webserver to point to /whatever.com as the root of the website.
Have a folder like /website/r1v00 to which you FTP the website files, then create a symlink called "whatever.com" that points to /website/r1v00
When you have an updated version of the website, create another folder called /website/r1v001, FTP all the files for the updated site, then change the symlink for "whatever.com" to now point to /website/r1v01. If there are any problems with the new site, you can back it out instantly by simply pointing the "whatever.com" symlink back to /website/r1v00
Of course, you can/should set up scripts to automate the creation and switching of the symlink. In my case, I have an "admin" page written in PHP that lists all the available versions, and allows me to switch to any of them. This technique has saved my bacon several times...!
Obviously this does not address any issues with versioning database schemas or database content.