So, like most of you, I develop my sites locally using MAMP. I've recently been learning git and in doing so, preparing to drop FTP from my workflow completely.
Though, I was wondering if there's a best practice for handling WordPress' databases.
Currently I'm only using version control on my current theme, but would like to expand this into controlling the whole site locally and pushing it to the server accordingly. That means making changes to files, adding posts/pages and generally mucking around with the whole site, keeping both local and remote site in sync. Is this possible?
I've read tons of guides over the past week, and followed countless tutorials, so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
This is not really feasible, git is for file changes, not for your database. Due to how WordPress stores data in the database you cannot sync content without custom scripting (bash, ruby, etc) aka... jumping through hoops.
You can dump your database file using cron and throw it into git, but again you cannot sync the files due to how WordPress stores values.
This has been asked on https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/
Related
I'm very new to Drupal, so please don't be too mad in case I have any major misunderstandings :) I've tried searching for a similar problem, but is just couldn't find a suitable solution for my case.
We're currently setting up a Drupal 9 project, which will perspectively have a shared development environment and a production environment as well as a local instance to develop on. I'd wish to have a way to synchronize those instances to have the same configuration, content types and optionally even content.
At the moment, I'm developing a theme locally, which means I have installed a Drupal instance inside a XAMPP server. That theme is versioned by git, so it is migratable to another developer without a problem.
For migrating the structure and content (which is obviously saved in the database), I tried using Backup & Migrate, but there were two issues I was facing: The D9 version is not fully supported yet, so an installation via composer fails with default security settings, and there seems to be an already multiple times reported bug when trying to backup the entire site. You can workaround it by backing up the database and the files separately, but this is pretty inconvenient due to other issues (but let's keep it a little short...).
I also tried to export the whole database, which is actually working (after this little fix), but the overhead seems a little high for me. Especially when I just want to copy new content types from dev to prod environment without users, content and so on, for instance.
So, to finally come to an end, is there any best practice for this case? Or should I even consider to go a whole other way?
Thanks in advance!
I definitely wouldn't recommend using Backup & Migrate for this - that's so Drupal 7! Drupal 9 has better tools that are baked into core!
There are many possible ways to import/export Config and Content entities across environments, but I'll share what I believe to be the current best practices.
For Configuration, Drupal 9 has a built-in Configuration Management system that makes it quite easy to migrate Config across environments. It can be used within the Drupal UI, and also integrates with Drush (a command-line tool for Drupal).
Essentially, the Config system exports all Config settings as standardized YAML files, which can easily be included in your Git repository. This will make it incredibly easy to set up another Drupal environment that is identical in its Config settings.
More info on Configuration Management can be found here.
For Content, Drupal 9 has a built-in Migrate API, which facilitates migrations from any data source into a Drupal 9 environment. That means you could set up a migration that would allow you to migrate your Content entities across environments.
I've only ever used this for migrating Content (migrated from Drupal 7), but I believe it's also possible to use this to migrate Config as well.
If you decide to use the Migrate API, you may (depending on the setup of your content) need to install Migrate Tools and Migrate Plus.
More info on the Migrate API can be found here.
I develop on a local machine a Wordpress site and I'm now looking for a mechanism to deploy it easy and fast. I'm thinking about a DEV environment (located on my local machine), a STAGING environment (a subdomain on the client page, maybe staging.example.com) and of course a LIVE environment (example.com)!
My current workaround:
As I work with Aptana I'm able to sync my changed files with the deploy mechanism the IDE provides. Exporting my local database, finding/replacing the permalinks and importing the whole thing - finish! To deploy live, I have to replace all staging files with the live files.
This should be easier! Is there anyone out there, having a better workflow?
I'm open and really excited about your ideas!
Thanks a lot
greetings
Yep, it's frustrating and completely insane that Wordpress requires this process because they put absolute urls in the database. I develop in a similar fashion using multiple staging sites for qa and client review. After my first deployment with Wordpress I almost gave up on the platform entirely. All of the solutions recommended by core developers and others simply didn't work.
So I wrote a plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/root-relative-urls/
that fixes the problem. With this plugin you don't need to do a search & replace on your content. No hosts file hacks, or dns tricks. With my plugin you can access the site via IP address or Computername or any type of forwarded host. And since it converts urls to root relative before they enter the database, you won't have to worry about them working between the different domain formats. And since they don't hard-code the scheme (http/s) in the url you won't have to worry about the 520 or so bugs that were reported in the wordpress trac database if you use SSL.
It's a staple for any wordpress project I work on these days. And I have written a couple other plugins to deal with idiosyncrasies that exist in the platform that you can check out here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/marcuspope
Hope that answers your problem.
I use Capistrano https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki/ for all my deployment needs and it is really good solution. You can simply script anything and it just works.
It could work for your deployment scheme too.
I also use Capistrano for both WordPress and Drupal deployments. I typically install modules locally for testing then push to test and production environments. For uploads, etc. I add custom tasks to manage syncing files stored in scm and those that are not. Here is a simple guide I put together.
http://www.celerify.com/deploy-wordpress-drupal-using-capistrano
We are a software development company and are using Wordpress for static portion of the web site. Naturally, all our workflow is built around version control: multiple developers -> continious integration -> staging -> deployment.
Our challenge with integrating Wordpress into our workflow is that its database is stuck like a bone in the throat: you cannot put it into the version control, easily roll back, promote from staging to production etc.
I am wondering what people do in similar situations? I would like to find a way to integrate WP into the development workflow and not the other way around :-)
Clarification we want to "develop" and test pages on the staging system and when ready then move them over to the production as part of the version upgrade process. We don't want to do full replication of the staging database to production.
That's a common question and one that I've worked on tackling. I've written some code to address these issues albeit the code's not ready for distribution. Basically the idea is to create scripts to import the content and then version control the scripts. (Actually my approach uses a custom import/export format designed to be easy to hand-modify, but the idea is similar.)
Anyway, there are some related questions over on StackOverflow's sister site WordPress Answers:
Questions tagged with the term [staging]
Questions tagged with the term [deploy]
UPDATE
Per the clarification, this would probably be helpful too:
Is there any way to draft a revision of a published page or post? What workarounds have you used?
Hope this helps.
-Mike
I've just hit the same problem. For now we are using MySQL dump files to export/import database content, but it gets ugly with several people working on the database changes.
Since the team that works on the project is all internal and consists of just a few people, I'm thinking into the direction of locking the database dump file in VCS. Subversion had this functionality built-in, but we are using git, which, I think, is conceptually opposite of any kind of locking.
Probably we'll have a workaround script with pre-commit hook to check for the existence of a lock file next to the dump. The person who committed the lock file will be the only one allowed to commit the dump. Once he finishes the work, he will need to commit the removal of the lock file.
It sounds ugly, I know. But I've thought about it for a while and don't see an elegant solution yet.
If you're only using WordPress for static content, then any tool/methodology for version controlling databases should work - for example, work the mysql command line tools into your CI and deployment routines.
For simple projects, it is suffice enough to use subversion to synchronise theme/plugin code between team's Wordpress installations. However, with larger projects, in which themes/plugins are content dependent, content needs to be synchronised as well. Is there a way to do it automatically instead of using Import / Export tools from Wordpress?
You can set this plugin to an hourly backup: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup. It can send backups to email, save them on server or download them on your machine (if done manually). Content is saving its revisions anyway so I don't think you'll have problems with that.
SVN for the files sounds actually pretty neat, even without having other people working on your WordPress installation, but can you install svn client on a shared hosting? If you got a server of your own, this won't be an issue for you.
Hope this helps you a bit!
I really like drupal somehow. But what disturbs me most is that i can't figure out a clear way of deployment. Drupal stores a lot of stuff inside the database (views, cck, workflow, trigger etc) that needs to be updated.
I've seen some modules that could be used for this task (eg features) and I'm not sure if they are sufficient. Yet they are only for drupal6 and i currently have to work on a drupal5 site where updating is not yet an option.
Any ideas?
This is a weakness. Drupal doesn't have the developer tools built in that make development and deployment easy like Rails does (for example). One problem is Drupal isn't aware of it's environment natively. Secondly, there are too many different methods and modules that require special care. It can get very confusing. But things are getting better with drush and drush make.
I'm assuming here that you have a development environment on your local machine and a live or staging server you upload to.
The first thing you have to do is work out how to get your database fixture and your code to and from your server to your development environment very quickly. You need to make this proceedure as painless as possible so you can keep different versions of your site in sync without much effort. This will mean you will hopefully be able to manage less change every time you deploy. Hopefully...
Moving the database around isn't too hard. You could use phpMyadmin or mysqldump but the backup migrate module is my favorite tool.
To upload code from your local repository or site can be done in a few ways. If you use a version control system like git, you can commit on your local machine and check out again on the staging server. There are also special deployment tools like capistrano you should take a look at. (if you know this stuff already it may benefit others to read). If you're using FTP you should probably try something different.
If you're working with a site that is still in production, you can afford to make small incremental changes to your local site, then repeat on the live site and down load the new version of the database when your changes are in place. This does mean you double handle the database but can be a safe way of doing things. It keeps both your database closer to each other and minimises risk.
You can also export views backup to your server in either your code or importing them into your live site. There is a hack to get around deploying cck changes here: http://www.tinpixel.com/node/53 it works OK but cannot truly manage changes like rollbacks. (Respect to the guy who wrote that)
You can also use hook_updateN to capture changes and then run update.php to apply them. I worked on a d5 site with dozens of developers and this was the only way to keep things moving forward. This may be a good option if your site is live or if you need all database schema changes captured in a version control system (so you can roll back).
Also: Take a look at drush and drush make. These tools can be of great benefit. I can't remember how much support is for d5.
One final method of dealing with this is not to use cck or views (and use hook updates). But this is really only suitable for enterprise sites where you have big developer resources. This may seem like a strange suggestion but it can negate this whole problem completely.
Sorry I could not give you a clear answer. This is because one does not exist yet. You'll end up finding your own rhythm once you get into. Just keep backups of your database if you can roll back to them easy enough.