I have a problem with maintenance of my php based website. My website is built on the Zend Framework. When I wish to upload a new copy or version online - during the time of upload especially when crucial files like models and controllers are being uploaded and rewritten - the site won't run understandably.
Is there a way to upload a website without having to go through this issue?
My updates are really quite regular. Let's say like once or twice a week in this case.
You can make use of the fact that renaming directories is quick and easy even through FTP. What I usually do is:
Have two directories, website_live and website_upload
website_live contains the live website (obviously)
Upload contents to website_upload
Rename website_live to website_old (or whatever)
Rename website_upload to website_live
done! Downtime less than two seconds if you rename quickly.
It gets a bit more complex if you have uploaded content in the old version (e.g. from a CMS) that you need to transfer to the new one. It's cumbersome to do manually every time, but basically, it's just simple rename operations too (renaming works effortlessly in FTP as well).
This is a task that can be automated quite nicely using a simple deployment script. If you're on Linux, setting up a shell script for this is easy. On Windows, a very nice tool I've worked with to do automated FTP synchronizing, renaming and error handling - even with non-technical people starting the process - is ScriptFTP. It comes with a good scripting language, and good documentation. It's not free, though.
If you're looking to get into hard-core automated PHP deployment, I've been doing some research in that field recently. Maybe the answers to my recent bounty question can give you inspiration.
Related
Me and my friend are in different countries have been developing a LAMP web app for several weeks. All these times we have been sharing source code over ftp. In this way php files become messy. I have heard about CVS, and have been reading about it. But I still cannot figure out how it works exactly.
How does the CVS could help me in this matter ?
I would be much appreciated for someone who point me in the right direction.
Ok here comes a very simple explanation of VCS. After using it for a while you'll laugh at the explanation but for now I guess this should help you.
What are the problems of your current ftp file sharing?
If 2 people upload the same file one of the files will get overwritten
After uploading it you'll only see who changed the file (the last time) but not where it got changed
You can't provide information about the changes (despite putting comments in the files itself)
You can't go back in time, once uploaded old files are lost
With version control you can solve these problems:
Files get either merged into one new file, or get overwritten but the old file will still be stored to roll back if needed
You can see who made which changes when
You can provide comments when you "upload" your files about what got changed (without storing these comments inside files)
You can always go back in time and restore old "uploads"/changes
You can also create small side projects by branching. This basically let's you split your project in smaller pieces and work on them separately.
So at the beginning of your work you usually get your local sources up-to-date by getting all the changes that got made. Then you do your work and afterwards you update the online version with your changes so that other developers can pull these changes and continue to work on them or integrate these changes into their current changes.
How to implement this sorcery?
You could google for "how to implement git" or "how to implement svn" but I would recommend you to use an online service as a beginner. Here is a list of services: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting
My personal preference for closed source projects with a low number of developers is https://bitbucket.org/. You get a small wiki page and bug tracking tool provided with some of the services. If you want to use bitbucket, here is the very easy to understand documentation: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Bitbucket+101
Important to know:
Soon you'll learn that you don't upload files as I've written multiple times but rather change lines of code. You also don't upload them you "commit" them.
While cvs could help, not many developers will recommend using it for new projects. It has largely been replaced with Subversion (svn), but even that is falling out of favour. Many projects these days use distributed version control with git or Mercurial (hg).
A good introduction to git can be found in the free online book Pro Git.
In any case, these things are all version control systems. They help to synchronize the code between developers, and also let you track
who changed code,
when it was changed,
why it was changed, and
how it was changed.
This is very important on projects with multiple developers, but there is value in using such a system even when working on your own.
Until now, I always used the FTP transfer provided with Netbeans. Everytime I write and save, it uploads the file to the server.
Now I have a project that me and my co-worker have to work on. The method above isn't the best anymore, because if I do some changes and save, and so my co-worker, we overwrite each other modifications.
What's the best way to cooperate on the same PHP/CSS/HTML project? Could you provide some guide too?
Thanks.
PS: OS Win7.
I personally use Mercurial (Hg) when working on projects with a team.
There is a Tutorial for using Mercurial with NetBeans.
When your team is small you could use bitbucket.org to host your project as it is free and private (but in the free version limited to 5 people per project I think). Otherwise you could easily set up your own hg-server. There are plenty of guides on how to use Mercurial on their website
In case you are not familiar with distributed version controll systems. In a nutshell it works like this:
When a file is created it gets pushed to the server
As people make changes to their local copy of that file (or the files) they create changesets which contain only the changes they made.
Everyone pushes theis changesets to the server from time to time and pulls the changes the others have made. The changesets are then merged to contain everybodys changes.
The files on your computer are updated according to the changesets you have pulled so that everybodys files are up to date.
This works pretty well as long you don't edit the same lines of code (because then the automatic merging fails because it doesn't know what to keep and what to discard and you have to merge manually) and your files are not in a binary dataformat.
But in your case HTML, PHP and CSS are all text based so you are good to go.
I hope this helped. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Sorry I could not post more links because my reputation is too low.
I've built a CMS (using the Codeigniter PHP framework) that we use for all our clients. I'm constantly tweaking it, and it gets hard to keep track of which clients have which version. We really want everyone to always have the latest version.
I've written it in a way so that updates and upgrades generally only involve uploading the new version via FTP, and deleting the old one - I just don't touch the /uploads or /themes directories (everything specific to the site is either there or in the database). Everything is a module, and each module has it's own version number (as well as the core CMS), as well as an install and uninstall script for each version, but I have to manually FTP the files first, then run the module's install script from the control panel. I wrote and will continue to write everything personally, so I have complete control over the code.
What I'd like is to be able to upgrade the core CMS and individual modules from the control panel of the CMS itself. This is a "CMS for Dummies", so asking people to FTP or do anything remotely technical is out of the question. I'm envisioning something like a message popping up on login, or in the list of installed modules, like "New version available".
I'm confident that I can sort out most of the technical details once I get this going, but I'm not sure which direction to take. I can think of ways to attempt this with cURL (to authenticate and pull source files from somewhere on our server) and PHP's native filesystem functions like unlink(), file_put_contents(), etc. to preform the actual updates to files or stuff the "old" CMS in a backup directory and set up the new one, but even as I'm writing this post - it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I don't use git/github or anything, but I have the feeling something like that could help? How should (or shouldn't) I approach this?
Theres a bunch of ways to do this but the least complicated is just to have Git installedo n your client servers and set up a cron job that runs a git pull origin master every now and then. If your application uses Migrations it should be easy as hell to do.
You can do this as it sounds like you are in full control of your clients. For something like PyroCMS or PancakeApp that doesn't work because anyone can have it on any server and we have to be a little smarter. We just download a ZIP which contains all changed files and a list of deleted files, which means the file system is updated nicely.
We have a list of installations which we can ping with a HTTP request so the system knows to run the download, or the click can hit "Upgrade" when they log in.
You can use Git from your CMS: Glip. The cron would be a url on your own system, without installing Git.
#Obsidian Wouldn't a DNS poisoning attack also compromise most methods being mentioned in this thread?
Additionally SSH could be compromised by a man in the middle attack as well.
While total paranoia is a good thing when dealing with security, Wordpress being a GPL codebase would make it easy to detect an unauthorized code change in your code if such an attack did occur, so resolution would be easy.
SSH and Git does sound like a good solution, but what is the intended audience?
Have you taken a look at how WordPress does it?
That would seem to do what you want.
Check this page for a description of how it works.
http://tech.ipstenu.org/2011/how-the-wordpress-upgrade-works/
I'm building a webapp that as a small subset of one of the features allows images to be uploaded. I'm running a lamp stack, with Mongo instead of MySql.
I use a javascript uploader with a php backend to upload the files. The whole framework is under version control though, so I don't want to dump these files anywhere inside my framework, as it would get messy with the version control, and sub-optimal when I eventually migrate the media over to a CDN.
So, my question is - On a VPS, where should I drop these images for now? In some folder external to my framework? In my DB as bson? I've heard Mongo does a decent job handling binary data...
And, as a follow up, if I'm eventually planning on moving the content over to a CDN, how would you recommend structuring my schema for now?
My current plan would be something like the following:
All uploads are named with a unique
ID and dropped in an external
folder, defined by a globally
accessible variable of sorts.
A reference to each images' name is
stored in the db.
Is there anything obviously stupid about going about it that way, possibly causing me a scaling headache later?
Here's a summarized specific question, just so this is a little more of an SO friendly question:
Given a Linux, Apache, Mongo, PHP Framework on a VPS, what is the best way to store uploaded images while keeping scalability and speed as the 2 most important factors in deciding on the solution?
if your plan is moving to CDN, the answer couldn't be more easy: create a subdomain on your VPS, and drop your images there, and you will have decent CDN simulation as well as reliable file storage.
I do agree that you should never put user uploaded content inside your webapp for many number of reasons but then one of the problem is how to show img tag in HTML which takes src attribute relative to webapp.
An easy workaround can be: Suppose create a folder /usr/ImagesUPloadByUser on your unix box and drop all images there. and then create a link ( linux link) in your webapp which points to correct directory. Now the images are not residing in ur webapp and you also have easy access .
I keep seeing all these cool new frameworks for web dev, but am very confused, because 95% of the info I read is all just hype, how do they work?
Is it as simple as providing a link in your html to a server that hosts the framework? Or do you have to download the framework, and install it on your own server?
Do web frameworks work with Winhost.com (windows-based hosting with php), or the many other windows-based hosting providers? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but the pages I have visited are very confusing!
Most of the frameworks would require you to download them and re upload them to your hosting.
Since having some crazy requirements would hit the popularity of such framework, most of the populars one tends to have as less as possible requirements. I.e. you don't need to have specific PHP extensions or PHP settings, so it would be possible to use them on any hosting(PHP5 hosting, zf, symphony and other don't play well with PHP4).
In term of what a framework brings you, you can see a framework as a big code base the you can use to make your development faster. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Plus a framework would force you to code more cleanly.
Generally speaking and in a nutshell, they allow you to generate HTML (with code) instead of providing static pages to the users. This also means you get to code less and don't repeat yourself.
PHP and Ruby on Rails are examples of web frameworks. You have to get them installed on a server.
Here's how it works.
Static HTML page is the oldest type of webpage. You write some HTML code, and when the server receive request from browser it parses the URL and determine which HTML file corresponds to the URL.
Dynamic page, is similar to static HTML page; but instead of writing HTML code, you write PHP/ASP/Python/CGI/etc code that writes HTML code.
As it happens, a lot of dynamic websites shares a large chunk of similar PHP/ASP/Python/CGI/etc code. A web framework is a set of pre-written code someone else have written; so instead of you writing the code, you offload half of the code-writing to the web framework's authors.
Different framework have different requirements. The simplest are just several simple PHP pages you can include() into your own codes (i.e. installing is a matter of copying the PHP pages into the same directory as your own code). The more complex one might reverse the role, they take control how the page is processed (i.e. installation is more involved, they might need to tweak the server's configurations).