Configuring "Web application URL" for team use - apache-flex

So, I'm trying to take advantage of 'Path Variables' (or Linked Resources), in my teams FlashBuilder4 project properties, so that its not such a bear to get a new project out of SVN, and up and running. I'm all done with that, except that I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do for the "Web application URL" .
It doesn't allow me to create a "Path Variable" for http:// type items, only files and folders.
Short of saying that all developers need to configure their servers exactly thus, how can I configure this property so that individual team-members settings don't interfere with other team-members ?

What we do is create Linked Resources to point to a debug directory e.g. project/r11.1/dist in the main project. Everyone has r11.1/dist directory structure within their project. Each person has a local Apache server running, and each person sets up a local Alias in the server for r11.1 that points to whatever location the dist files are stored C:/.../r11.1/.
The SVN only contains the Apache Linked Resource name plus the common folder structure i.e. DISTRIBUTION/r11.1/dist along with the server name i.e. http://localhost.whatever.com/ + {DISTRIBUTION}/r11.1/dist
Does this make any sense in terms of what your after?

Here's what I did to solve the problem. I hate it, but it gets me to where I need to go.
I assigned the "Web Application URL" to the value "https://HOSTS.DASHBOARD.DEV/foo/bar/blah/..."
Then, each of the developers needed, in addition, to create an entry in their HOSTS file, to resolve 'HOSTS.DASHBOARD.DEV' to the proper ip address.
This works (so far), even though I'm less than satisfied with it.

Related

Moving ASP.net site to another server

Assume I have asp.net websites on Server1 and need to move them to Server2, what is the best practice for this and how do I ensure that all relevant files, databases, etc are moved as well? Am I going to have to manually amend all the web.configs and other config files, plus find out what dependencies each site has, or is there a way to just export everything and import to the new server?
I have not found anything else on SO that has instructions for this.
Thanks
Edit: This is similar but not the same as the other question. The other question doesn't actually provide an answer, just some ideas about staging environments.
I'd like this to be as automated as possible due to having about 30 applications to move. The new server is pretty much identical but I noticed that when I moved one application using 'Web Deploy' as a test, it didn't bring over the dependencies and I had to manually find out which ones were missing and install them.
how do I ensure that all relevant files, databases, etc are moved as
well?
Typical asp.net sites have all data, and database under the one main directory. So you just copy/paste the full directory from the old to the new one server.
But we have some points to note here.
DataBase files are locked by the database, so you need to first remove them from the database.
In the new site you need to remount the database files and change the web.config according to the new server (eg, maybe new ip address, new names on database.
and finally the permissions on the new host must be correct and the same, if you have for example some directory that you need write permissions, you must add it also to the new server
You can also read: How to set correct file permissions for ASP.NET on IIS

Confused on what is the correct procedure on storing passwords in Web.config for Azure deployment

I've had a very frustrating experience on putting an MVC 5 app on Azure. I have been reading the following page: http://www.asp.net/identity/overview/features-api/best-practices-for-deploying-passwords-and-other-sensitive-data-to-aspnet-and-azure
But what I haven't managed to put in my head is the following:
Security Warning: Do not add your secrets .config file to your project or check it into source control. By default, Visual Studio sets the Build Action to Content, which means the file is deployed. For more information see Why don't all of the files in my project folder get deployed? Although you can use any extension for the secrets .config file, it's best to keep it .config, as config files are not served by IIS. Notice also that the AppSettingsSecrets.config file is two directory levels up from the web.config file, so it's completely out of the solution directory. By moving the file out of the solution directory, "git add *" won't add it to your repository.
And:
Security Warning: Unlike the AppSettingsSecrets.config file, the external connection strings file must be in the same directory as the root web.config file, so you'll have to take precautions to ensure you don't check it into your source repository.
The problem is the following: When I upload the Web.config file with the external files without being included I get hit by "The System cannot find the file specified", so for it to go away I must include the .config files defeating the purpose of Microsoft's post.
I really really really do not understand. I have added the connectionStrings and appSetting's keys in Azure's portal. What is the correct and secured way of putting my passwords and secrets online? What am I missing? Is it because I'm running in Debug mode?
According to this:
How can I secure passwords stored inside web.config?
There is nothing to worry about accessing the Web.config file...
But that just defies Microsoft's post.
Thanks.
I find the following technique to be the easiest way to do this.
Instead of putting the deployment values of these settings into the web.config, I keep the test values in there instead. I then put the deployment values into the Application Settings section of the Azure Website via the Azure Portal:
When the website runs, these settings will take precedence over what is in the web.config. This helps me avoid externalized files, allows me to keep sane development configuration that the team can share, and makes deployment very easy.
The best way is to set your secrets in the Connection Strings section of the portal. Any values set there will override values you specify in your web.config file.
This way they are only exposed to people who have admin access over the site itself. Having full access to the source won't even be enough to get the secret values.
More details here

How do I get the ASP.NET content relative path

Doing a project between multiple people, and a few components (web app, services app and some others). We will be storing some information inside the Content folder of the web app so it can be accessed directly from the web server with an href, however other components outside of the web app need to access this folder as well, and since we are sharing the project between multiple people using an absolute path is not an option. What options do we have?
EDIT: Trying to explain it a little better.
What i have exactly is, a web project, a "data project" which is just a dll, a "logic" project which is another dll and a services project which is an exe/service.
Both the web project and service project consumes the methods from the logic, and the logic from the data project. Being the last one the responsable for storing data (in a database) and also in the file system.
This "filesystem" path should be configurable, and we are aiming to put it into the content folder of the web project so multimedia files can be accessed directly rather than doing a byte stream.
Now in the web.config(config file of the web app), and app.config(config file of the services app) i could set the absolute path to web/content (the same for both config files) and the data dll would use it without problems. Now the main problem is that we cannot put an absolute path in the config file because each person works on a different computer with obviously different file paths. So if i could just write something like: ~/project/Web/Content rather than C:/myfolder/stuff/blabla/project/web/content in the config files, with ~ resolving the path to the project, this is what i want! Or maybe better ideas about how to share a folder with these apps without adding absolute paths hardcoded somewhere.
What you want to use is:
Server.MapPath("/Content/filepath.ext");
This will give you the absolute path of a file based on it's position within the website, in this case, from the /Content directory.
For a program external to the website, you have a couple options;
The easiest to implement might be a simple configuration value in the external program which points to the directory. My guess is you've already decided that's not ideal, but it may be the quickest way.
Alternatively, there's a Microsoft .NET assembly which gives you easy access to IIS information (I can't recall its name off the top of my head!). You could use this assembly to find the appropriate website, and retrieve its root directory. I'll see if I can find it and get an example, or maybe someone else will see this and post an answer with that information.
Please check the following method "ResolveClientUrl"
MSDN
Use the ResolveClientUrl method to return a URL string suitable for use by the client to access resources on the Web server, such as image files, links to additional pages, and so on.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.resolveclienturl.aspx

Local Coldfusion server for multiple domains / URLs

I want to get CF9 with IIS 7 setup locally to run with multiple domains.
I have read this one but it doesn't say anything about the actual setup.
Need help with multiple URL setup on local CF9/Jrun install
I setup IIS so that I can start 127.0.0.1/domain1/index.cfm The page loads properly
but all subsequent links fail with
Could not find the included template: /_/definesession.cfm
But I see the file when typing in file:///C:/InetPub/wwwroot/domain1/_/DefineSession.cfm
The files are there but apparently the server is only reading the directory correctly
If I test http://127.0.0.1/domain1/_/BrowserDetect.cfm with no includes just a self contained file it executes properly.
The path in IIS is set to C:\InetPub\wwwroot\domain1
The bindings hostname is just domain1 no TLD
Also the second instance 127.0.0.1/domain2/index.cfm is working correctly. And here as well including subdirectories is failing.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: (added 1/3/12)
I guess it has to do with the CF mapping. I now moved the code to c:\coldfusion9\wwwroot\domain1_... and it sort of works.
In other words I start the program here: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\domain1\index.cfm Inside that index is for instance
But it executes the file located here: c:\coldfusion9\wwwroot\domain1_\definesession.cfm Just couldn't find anything in the web about mapping a local CF9 to that situation. Any idea??? –
You might have a ColdFusion mapping for "/" that needs to be adjusted.
OK I fixed it. There were multiple issues:
For whatever reason there were some issues with IIS and I had to reinstall it.
I had to make sure 9.0.1 was installed
I had to run Webserver Configuration Tool multiple times to actually get the Handler Mappings in order.
http://127.0.0.1/domain1/ was wrong - it must be http://domain1/ etc.
I forgot to add the domains to the host file on the machine - stupid me
I had to redesign my mapping to avoid overlaps between domains (i.e. mapping CFCs to /_/cfc/ on all domains needed to have different mapping names.
Now I have several different domains on my local machine and they work just fine.

Interacting With Folders Outside The Root/Web Directory With Dreamweaver (CS5)

Using FileZilla, I can access folders that are outside my web directory. How can I do the same with Dreamweaver so that I can edit the files and automatically save/upload all through Dreamweaver? I currently can only access the web directory.
I know how to include them with PHP, but I would like Dreamweaver to find/access them.
Thank you!
You would have to set the Site Definition (both local and remote) paths to look one level higher than you currently have it. So if the local path is
My Documents/Web Sites/This Site
you would change it to
My Documents/Web Sites/
and if the remote is:
/user/home/domain.com/
change to
/user/home/
The problem you are going to run into is that Dreamweaver doesn't work well when set like this. It assumes the Remote path is the public web root and will create all sorts of files and folders there automatically and DW expects those to be in the public root. Also, things like setting paths to includes and images automatically will start to not work as all paths will start outside of the public web root.
Best to leave it as it is and use an external FTP program to handle the files outside of the web site.
We've bumped up against this situation previously where the desire was to have the PHP include files be moved outside the public HTML directory. JCL1178's answer is absolutely conceptually correct.
The actual implementation was to duplicate the site (under "Manage Sites") and essentially create a separate site for the "includes" directory that would go one level up. So the "Root Directory" setting was normal (in our case "public_html/" in the main site and we removed "public_html/" from the Root Directory setting in the "includes" site, effectively causing the path to go one level up.
Definitely not an ideal situation/workflow, to say the least, as you'll end up with two site definitions for one site (which can cause other issues); but Dreamweaver is what it is. We were working on a project offsite that did not allow for anything other than Dreamweaver to be used, so this is what we came up with to comply.
As an added note: we were only able to implement this solution because the webhosting plan allowed us to get to the root. If you're on a webhosting plan that is strictly limited to the public directory, the whole thing will be DOA.

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