Wanted to check with everyone to see how you implement changes and updates from your development/test site to your production/live site. I've created my development site but trying to figure out best way to implement any changes I make and test on my development site to my live store. To implement your updates and changes do you:
Once fully tested, make duplicate set of changes on live site?
Copy folders and files over from development site to production site?
Any other approach?
Any feedback or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.
Wanted to check with everyone to see how you implement changes and updates from your development/test site to your production/live site. I've created my development site but trying to figure out best way to implement any changes I make and test on my development site to my live store. To implement your updates and changes do you:
Once fully tested, make duplicate set of changes on live site?
Copy folders and files over from development site to production site?
Any other approach?
Any feedback or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.
Mark
It depends on what you are going to implement and on the amount of changes. If there are few small changes it is easier to duplicate them in your live installation. If the changes are major it is better to copy your test installation to the live one.
you can also make a duplicate of live store to for example /dev/ path and clone of DB, in /dev/config.local.php update cloned DB access credentials. After you all done and move /dev/ to / cloned db will become default one..
Thanks for the workflow overview. That's the way I've been exploring but my big concern is making sure that I don't miss any files that require path updates. We're looking to go live in the next month so still ironing out how to make updates without disrupting the live store.
We keep the sparse source (only files that have been changed) locally. We update to the dev site and after it is tested and verified, we simply synch our changes back to the production site. We also use in-house built tools for cloning the production site to a dev site so that we're sure we're working from the same source (and database) base for any development. After we synch with production, we usually re-sync the dev site from production ensuring everything is always in sync.
However, if you have multiple developers and overlapping completion times of projects then you would have alter your methods.
Do note that if properly developed, the number of distributed files that are modified will be minimal. So only php and template hooks would mostly be updated.