We have various php projects developed on windows (xampp) that need to be deployed to a mix of linux/windows servers.
We've used capistrano in the past to deploy from windows to the linux servers, but recent changes in architecture and windows servers left the old config not working. The recipe works fine for the linux deployment, but setting up the windows servers has required more time than we have right now. Ideas for the Capistrano recipe are valid answers. obviously the windows/linux servers don't share users, so this complicates it a tad (for the capistrano assumption of same username/password everywhere).
Currently we're using svn-update for the windows servers, which i dislike, since it leaves all the svn files hanging on the production servers. (and we still have to manually svn-update them on windows) And manual updating of files using winscp and syncing the directories with their linux counterparts.
My question is, what tools/setup do you suggest to automatize this deployment scenario:
"Various php windows/linux developers deploying to 2+ mixed windows/linux machines"
(ps: we have no problems using linux tools or anything working through cygwin, we simply need to make deployment a simple one-step operation)
edit: Currently we can't work on a all-linux enviroment, we have to deploy to both linux and windows server. We can start the deploy from anywhere, but we'd prefer to be able to do it from either enviroment.
I use 4 different approaches depending on the client environment:
Capistrano and similar tools (effective, but complex)
rsync from + to Windows, Linux, Mac (simple, doesn't enforce discipline)
svn from + to Windows, Linux, Mac (simple, doesn't enforce discipline)
On-server scripts (run through the browser, complex)
There are some requirements that drive what you need:
How much discipline you want to enforce
If you need database (or configuration) migrations (up and/or down)
If you want a static "we're down" page
Who can do the update
Configuration differences between servers
I strongly suggest enforcing enough discipline to save you from yourself: deploy to a development server, allow for upward migrations and simple database restore, and limit who can update the live server to a small number of responsible admins (where the dev server is open to more developers). Also consider pushing via a cron job (to the development server), so there's a daily snapshot of your incremental changes.
Most of the time, I find that either svn or rsync setups are enough, with a few server-side scripts, especially when the admin set is limited to a few developers.
This will probably sound silly but... I used to have this kind of problem all the time until I decided in the end that if I'm always deploying on Linux, I ought really to at least try developing on Linux also. I did. It was pain free. I never went back.
Now. I am not suggesting this is for everyone. But, if you install VirtualBox you could run a Linux install as a local server on your windows box. Share a folder in the virtual machine and you can use all your known and trusted Windows software and techniques and have the piece of mind of knowing that everything is working well on its target platform.
Plus you'll be able to go back to Capistrano (a fine choice) for deployment.
Best of all, if you thought you knew Linux / Unix wait until you use it everyday on your desktop! Who knows you may even like it :)
Capistrano is the nicest deployment tool I've seen. Do the architecture changes make it impossible to fix the configs so it works again?
Why you can't use capistrano anymore?
Why you dislike svn-update?
What things in your app requires an special deployment ?
You can setup svn:ignore property on configuration files, so that svn update doesn't erase them, and then use svn export /target/path/ to get rid of .svn files in your Subversion repository.
Related
What I have so far:
Two VirtualBox LAMP machines (separate locations) where I connect my two Windows development machines via SFTP, to write code using PHPStorm.
One VPS machine where I deploy my code written for a project in Laravel.
What I am trying to achieve:
Fast and easy code deployment, as in: write the code in Windows via PHPStorm, test it on the LAMP machine, deploy to VPS if necessary.
The problem is that I need to use some php artisan commands on LAMP machines to get some code generated. This means that I always have to synchronize PHPStorm with LAMP files tree in order to see the changes. Then, I need to also sync the other dev (LAMP) machine and the other PHPStorm running on Windows machine number 2. I know that this can be done via Git.
So everytime I use the command line to generate code, I need to sync 4 machines (excluding the deployment server).
Later, if I add another pair of Windows/LAMP dev machines, the complexity grows.
Back in the days of Dreamweaver, I could write code directly on the deployment server. Not the greatest idea, but it was way much simpler and faster, and that's what I need now.
Any ideas on how can I simplify this?
Switching to WAMP so I can have files in sync with PHPStorm (because all is locally) is not OK because... Windows and PHP libraries issues :)
Also, switching to Dreamweaver is not OK either.
What other options do I have?
Thanks!
LE: on the side, I am also thinking if a NAS can be helpful for this type of problem.
LLE: is Linux Desktop + PHPStorm the only straight solution?
No matter the protocols
You can put your code outside of the guest machine and configure the guest machine to mount the code (mount a folder from the host inside the guest).
Apache will run slower because it will use the mounted remote-folder but PHPStorm will run at its maximum speed.
Taking protocols into consideration
Try using SSHFS on windows.
I use SSHFS for remote development from my Linux host machine to headless vagrant boxes (and/or to remote development servers / staging servers).
It's much faster than SAMBA (the windows SMB protocol) and oddly faster than NFS even though SSH uses encryption.
Coleages using Windows+SMB often leave their computers for 30 min while PHPStorm is indexing and git branch changes on the dev machine go unnoticed for minutes at a time.
Indexing over SSHFS usually takes less than 5 min on a Symfony2 project. Branch changes are detected in less than 15s.
Using Linux (shameless plug)
Linux is nice, and it's free, and it works out of the box (Ubuntu) -- including pesky USB-Modems which would normally require an install on windows.
You already know how to handle a Linux CLI the learning curve is already halfway crossed.
Auto-updates don't rule your life, they're not the king of you!
All the applications you need are part of the software repositories you don't need to look for anything, download 40+ executables and attempt to install them just to be welcomed by an error "invalid architecture", "windows version not supported", ".NET framework version too old", "DirectX version too new (wtf?)", "your cousin is a software pirate".
Dependency management is a concept Linux never fully solved -- but at least the bloody tried and in 90% of consumer use-cases it fits the bill. Windows is still eating glue at the back of the class.
How I solved the problem:
I have an extra Mac, on which I installed everything for my PHP ecosystem, including the IDE, so everything is local. That's the dev machine. Then I manually copy the code to the VPS when needed. Another solution was to install Ubuntu Desktop (or similar) on dual boot with Windows and use it as a local dev environment.
Much faster development / deployment :)
We've been battling this problem for some time now, and can't seem to find a perfect solution that would satisfy all the requirements of making life easier for developers.
Right now we have the following setup:
Linux development server (as everything we produce runs on linux, and it uses some linux-specifix libraries)
Windows desktops (as the office network is on windows)
Every developer has a home folder on the dev server with a virtual host set up to run their code. This folder is shared using Samba.
Zend Studio IDE that is set up to use that location (as a network drive) to work on projects
Remote debugging to be able to run applications on the dev server and be able to step through the code
So the main problem we are having is that everything is slow...
Zend is slow to index the project, as it has quite a bit of files (including externals like full framework) that need to be transferred through SMB.
Remote debugging is slow, as Zend studio needs to fetch the file, then send it back to the server to run it (running "Local if available, else server"; otherwise breakpoints don't work)
Tortoise SVN is slow to get file status for the commit (command line remedies the problem, but it's much less user friendly, especially with more complicated things like conflict resolution while merging)
Branching out to any of the solutions that would have multiple server configurations brings up a problem that there is a chance of having different configurations everywhere, which will introduce additional layer of uncertainty and possibly bugs in production.
Development and debugging under windows is not possible because of linux dependencies in the code (like POSIX functions).
So how do organizations solve these problems? What kinds of set up are you using? What kinds of problems are you facing, and how to you resolve them?
One solution that works in some situations is to :
Have the code on your local disk, on the physical computer running windows
This code is the one you're modifying with your IDE
So, IDE is working as fast as possible : no SMB access for each file.
Also have the code on the Linux server
So Apache runs fast : the code is present on the server
Use some kind of synchronisation mecanism, to push every modification made on a file on the Windows machine to the Linux server, via the SMB share.
Using Eclipse, the FileSync plugin does a good job, over the SMB share.
WinSCP can also be used, to keep a remote and local folder synchronized, over an SSH connexion
Advantages :
All local operations are fast
All server operations are fast
Drawbacks :
You must always use the tool that ensures synchronisation (For instance, with FileSync, everything must be done in Eclipse -- and nothing in any other software)
Note : for SVN, no need to use Tortoise : there are plugins that integrate into Eclipse (Subversive, for example)
Not sure about debugging
Modifications done directly on the Linux machine might not (depending on the solution) get synchronized to the windows desktop.
Still, the best (fastest and most powerful) solution is generally to use only one computer -- that would run Linux, in your case, and not Windows.
Your tools will most likely work under Linux
If needed, you can install Windows in a Virtual Machine, for some software that don't run on Linux
It'll encourage everyone in your team to know Linux better ; which is always useful, when your production environment is not Windows ;-)
I recently launched a service, meaning I can no longer work directly on the site, or I do so at a risk.
I haven't been able to find any "standard" or "best" way to make a development server. The two things I have seen are
a) Using a GIT or SVN to host the data (this doesn't quite solve my problem, I need to be able to develop somewhere, preferably not my home computer)
b) Capistrano (for Rails, is there something for PHP?)
The current solution I'm looking at is putting a complete copy of the server on "development.domain.com", which would then allow me to work on everything, and I can simply copy the files over to the main section.
Is this a workable solution? What's the optimal solution? (Separate server, special tools, etc.)
EDIT
This system be developed by a number of developers. The server settings have been tweaked considerably to allow for the full functionality and security of the system. Having the development on my own computer is not a workable solution, nor on an intranet type of system as none of our programmers are in the same location.
I'm looking for an on-a-server solution.
Three suggestions:
1) You are on the right track with making sure that your source code is in some form of source control (git and svn are both excellent choices). This should be priority #1.
2) Have EVERYTHING that has deviated from a standard configuration be in some form of source control. This means your apache configs, your php.ini, database configs, etc. Then when you setup your staging and dev servers you can be (relatively) assured that everything is the same across all of your servers, otherwise you are just guessing.
3) Look into some sort of build scripts, either ant, phing, or anything that you can use to reliable build your environment from scratch on any machine.
There are tons of other things you can do, but if you implement these three you'll be well on your way to having the ability to easily setup a dev/staging server. This will also give you the added benefit of ensuring that all of your developers have a similar environment when doing their development as well.
http://www.wampserver.com/ for windows
or
www.mamp.info for mac
or
load up a VM
Personally, I do my programming on a mac, running VMWare with suse or redhat for the server test environment. I've used mamp in the past and it works well; but sometimes I like to work in a real operating system.
That, or setup a physical test server. PHP / (choice of DB) now adays runs on anything (mac, windows, linux)
Depending on what how you want to do it, you could install VMWare right on the production server and dev in there; that is, if you run the server yourself. If your collocated or on shared hosting, you probably can't do that.
-Mario
Your development, staging, and production environments should be exactly the same otherwise you risk the change of something bombing as you move between environments. Obviously your development environment will have development settings (e.g. PHP's display_errors on, possibly a remote debugger, etc) but otherwise they should be as identical as possible.
As everyone else has mentioned if you aren't using version control you as asking for trouble. Not only is this a good practice for development but also eases deployment between your different environments. This is especially true when there are multiple developers working on a project.
I started to use a git repository as starting point. Main development is done on my local mac. At a certain point I push the changes and pull them on a development server where further testing is done. If everything is fine, I pull things on the development server. This is more or less the way, capistrano works, I think. I wrote a central script for these tasks, so I can update development or production servers with a single comand.
I get more and more trouble from running WAMP on my XP computer to solve my local development needs. It feels like as more and more things just go wrong or could not be installed at all to a Windows version of PHP.
I have been looking for an alternative and found AndLinux plus this link.
Would it be a good idea to get an Ubuntu box running virtually on my XP computer to simulate the production web server?
Yes, in case you don't want to use Linux as desktop OS running it virtually in a VM is quite practical. by using the VM's "shared folder" support you can use the same directory for local development using your Windows IDE and serving requests from the Web Server inside the VM.
In the past - ~5 ears ago or so - I used coLinux and wasn't too happy. On modern systems a small Linux VM just works well.
Regarding virtual machines:
Advantages
Isolation: Everything in the VM is completely separate from the host; no cross contamination.
Easy Testing: Most VM software have snapshot and rollback capabilities.
Mobility: If you wanted to, you could easily move the self-contained VM over to another machine.
Disadvantages
Inconvenient: File transfer between the host and guest. Using "shared folders" alleviates this somewhat.
Virtual Hardware: Not good for graphics-intensive programs or other software that relies on certain hardware features (which shouldn't be a problem in this case).
Generally speaking, the closer you can get to the production environment the better. Developing on Windows isn't wrong, per se, but you need to be able to test in an environment which matches production.
If you have the resources on your PC to do it in a VM, that will work just fine. If you don't, running it natively or using a remote server somewhere would also work.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe
In few months I start a project in PHP and I am hesitating to do like usual : develop on my Windows Vista 64bits machine. Since I know few things on Linux, I think it can be a good way to learn by working on a Linux distribution.
Do you think it's a good idea or not? I would run a VirtualBox with Ubuntu (on my Vista64bits). I was thinking to install XAMPP to be able to develop in PHP.
If you think it's a good idea, feel free to suggest me some tutorial about what I should know with Virtualizing an OS, or Linux/dev.
Update
I have build many website in PHP with Windows, the question is more about if it's a good way to start learning Linux by developing on it via a Virtual machine? I have 4 gigs rams, will it be smooth if I install Eclipse in the Virtual Machine? etc.
You should really develop on the same platform where you are going to deploy. I'm not saying it is bad to do differently, but it can save you some pain in the long run. OTOH, you might learn faster about platform differences that way. So, the main question is: do you want to have a production system running ASAP without much headache? Or, you want to spend some time and make some effort to learn how to develop cross-platform stuff?
And yes, there are differences. For example, case sensitive and case in-sensitive filenames. Then, some PHP functions use native C functions that have different implementation. For example, printf() does not produce the same amount of whitespace for some of the types. Resolution of time measurement (milliseconds vs microseconds) can be different, etc. Then, you have different ways filesystem permissions are handled. These are just some recent problems I've found that I can remember off the top of my head.
PHP should be the same on any platform - so where you develop shouldn't matter.
However, in my experience and observation,more sites running PHP are running on Linux than Windows.
Getting Apache and PHP setup on something like Ubuntu or Fedora is a cinch, and testing everything is pretty simple, too.
Also, when you go live with your site, what platform will it be running on? I prefer to do development on the platform it will be running on whenever possible.
Personally, I don't think that for local production you should be using a VM. Would you be running your IDE inside the VM too?
If you are aware enough of the pitfalls of moving between Windows and Linux environments (such as case sensitivity and permissions), you should have no problem developing on Windows and deploying on Linux.
Working on a Linux distribution is defnitely the easiest way to learn it. And setting up some servers and doing some dev work is an excellent start.
Virtualising Linux is also really easy. I've done it quite a few times and it's really obious. Also, going this way will ease you into using Linux, much better than just jumping in and finding out your wireless card is unsupported like I did :)
As for PHP development on Linux... I've done some PHP coding on Windows and on Linux and I can tell you there's very little difference between the two. I use Eclipse on both platforms and Apache &MySQL / XAMPP. The only major difference I've seen is that Linux is much more finicky about permissions and case.
PHP is not the same on all platforms, and until very recently the windows versions had problems which were not found in the Linux versions. Lots of useful features are *nix specific.
I would echo #Milan's sentiments about developing in the deployment environment. You learn a lot more about the deployment environment by doing so too.
On the VM issue, if you want all your Windows tools and your windows machine, setup a linux server in your VM (can have a GUI if you want, but you're going to mainly use it as a server). Set it up so that windows can view the apache install running in your VM and you use samba shares to access the vm's files like a drive in windows. That way, you develop in windows but are testing deploy / setup on a running linux server. While two devs at my shop run Ubuntu, a third needs to use Photoshop and various other bits of windows software all the time, so she uses this method of running a server in a VM but developing from windows.
Oh, and if you're running on Linux, don't use XAMPP! A few simple commands will have you up and running and you'll get a much better understanding of your deploy. XAMPP is fine, but it's for OS's that don't have Linux's package management.
while XAMPP works great, running Apache and PHP on Linux is a given; while on Windows it's something extra you have to do... and support. Also, most parts of the stack are far more optimised and mature for a POSIX environment. The database engine(s) performance is particularly sensitive to the available primitives.
Most OSS runs on windows, but it's a round peg whammed on a square hole.
On principle, I would advise against "learning by doing" in a real project - unless it it really small, or you have doen very similar projects before, so that the learning curve on project related issues would not be steep. In that case you may have ressources free for learning about the developing environment.
Generally I like the Linux environment better than Windows. Mainly because all the CLI tools you would need are provided and Bash beats cmd.ext any time. But with Cygwin I find even Windows a comfortable development environment.
Regarding PHP development I can't really see how it would be much different. Maybe there is some benefit in being forced to make the code more portable (things like line endings, forward slashes in filenames and such) if you use booth systems.
As a desktop or workstation there isn't much difference between the two. I find that the biggest differences lies in how you administer them, but hopefullt you have some other people doing that for you.
In my opinion you needn't to develop in a linux distribution.
Web Development can be done from any OS. I don't know, why you are programming for the web... as a professional? for your personal homepage?
I think, it's enough to get some free webspace running a PHP Server and to upload your files there... it doesn't take you much time and there are less things to manage.
a german student ;)
Use the OS your deployment server will be running, and it is highly probable to be linux. I have recently seen a deployment gone ultra bad cuz it was developed using wampserver and deployed on CentOS. With major differences in apache and PHP config. So know your deployment server and match it as closely as possible.
Try creating a development environment using VmWare Player. I have several Linux environments that I run on my Vista laptop. You could also just dual boot. I use Ubuntu, it is easy.
The side effect of developing inside a VM: more overhead and eventually the needs of additional tools to make the development more comfortable.
Often people need special tools for their development like Photoshop or some vector design tools not available on Linux. If the working copy of the project is inside the VM, it makes sense to have easy access to it. So you will setup SAMBA (which makes often problems with the login from XP) or setup SSL(SFTP)/FTP.
Also you must learn how to use networking with the VM (NAT, bridging, port forwarding).
On the other side, developing on another platform as the target can give some headache. I found myself often confused with .htaccess files for password protection, because oft the different path on Windows/Linux. If you forget to change this entries later on the production server, you have a problem...
A better solution: use the best of both worlds.
A VM eventually running later headless (no gui, more like a "remote server") with Ubuntu/Debian/FreeBSD) and only running the needed servers (Apache, MySQL, FTP, SSH...).
Eclipse or the other development tools on Windows/Mac.
5 years later: My opinion is to use the Linux solution. There are many advantages for using PHP in Linux. The primary reason is the level of help available from the community. PHP seems to be optimized for Linux environments as well.
There is also safety in numbers as an overwhelming number of sites are hosted and run with LAMP solutions. There are a wide range of frameworks and CMS' that run best on Linux with Apache2.
Make your life easier and start learning PHP straight away.