A little intro: I've been developing a WordPress website at my company, for a big, international client. Since it's launch some time ago, we've obviously had some improvements, tweaks, bugs, etc. We have a couple of developers here, working with a clean local - staging - production workflow, syncing our local environments with git. When changes have to be made, we pull a version from the live site, make changes locally, upload it on a staging site, and after approval and final testing, deploy to the live website.
Our last round of changes was a big one, recoding a lot of our theme files as well as tweaking the database a bit. After uploading it on the staging site for approval however, things went awry. Our contact person got confused with the versions, and went on to publish new posts and edit pages on the live site, as well as create new content on the staging site. I don't mean 'do the same thing on both'... they did some work on each.
Now I somehow have to sync the two, so I can deploy the site and move on to further development (we also need the site live because we wrote an API that communicates between the client's large corporate site, and it's smaller subsidiaries' sites)
I checked out these posts already:
How can I merge two MySQL tables?
Merge 2 SQL Server databases
Merging wordpress Databases
And I tried multiple built-in and plugin solutions.
Having a very large website a lot of custom fields (ACF) and having them translated in 4 languages, makes this even harder, I think. Exporting and importing has broken something on each try (often with the translation), and plugins like Database Sync only offer a complete replacement of the db's, and thus losing the unique content each site has. I have some knowledge of SQL queries, and could freshen these up a bit more, but I don't really see how I could manually merge the two sql-files.
In short: I need to sync 2 databases from 2 slightly different versions of mostly the same website. There is unique and duplicate content, as well as minor tweaks in WP.
I have a couple of Composite C1 CMS websites.
To edit them currently I use the web based CMS on the live site.
However - I would like to update the (code & content) in Visual Studio locally - then sync to the web. However, if my local copy is older than that online (e.g. a non techy client has edited something on the live site) and I Web Deploy - it will go over the top of the new file on the server.
I need a solution that works out the newest change? I can't find anything in Google or the C1 docs.
How can I sync - preferably using Web Deploy. Do I need some kind of version control?
Is there a best practice for this - editing the live site through the web interface seems a bit dicey & is slow.
The general answer to this type of scenario seems to be to use the Package Creator. With that you can develop locally, add the files you've changed to a package, and install that package on a live site. This solution does not at all cover all the parts of you question though, and has certain limitations:
You cannot selectively add content to a package. It's all pages or no pages.
Adding datatypes is easy, but updating them later requires you to delete the datatype (and data), and recreate the datatype.
In my experience packages works well for incremental site updates, if you limit the packages content to be front end stuff, like css, images and such.
You say you need a solution that works out the newest changes - I believe the only solution to this is yourself, with the aid of some tooling. I don't think there's a silver bullet solution here.
Should you use a version control system? Yes! By all means. Even if you are not sharing your code with anyone, a VCS is a great way to get to know Composite C1 from a file system perspective, as you can carefully track what files are changed on disk, as you develop. This knowledge is crucial when you want to continuously add features the a website that is already alive and kicking - you need to know what to deploy, and what not to touch.
Make sure you read the docs on how Composite fits in VCS: http://docs.composite.net/Configuration/C1-and-Version-Control
I assume that your sites are using the XML data storage (if you where using SQL Data Store, your content would not be overridden upon sync).
This means that your entire web application lives in one folder on disk on the web server, which can be an advantage here.
I'll try to outline a solution that could work for you, although I must stress that I've never tried this - I'm making it up as I type.
Let's say you're using git, download the site in it's entirety from the production web server, and commit the whole damned thing* to your master branch.
Then you create a new feature branch from that commit, and start making the changes you want to deploy later, and carefully commit your work as you go along, making sure you only commit the changes that are needed for your feature to work, to the feature branch.
Now, you are ready to deploy, and you switch back the master branch, and again download the entire site and commit it to master.
You then merge your feature branch into the master branch, and have git do all the hard work of stitching you changes in with the changes from the live site. There are bound to be merge conflicts, and that is where you will have to jump in, and decide for yourself what content needs to go live.
After this is done and tested, you can web deploy the site up to the production environment.
Changes to the live site might have occurred while you where merging, so consider closing the site, or parts of it, during this process.
If you are using SQL Data Store i suggest paying for a tool like Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare or SQL Delta, to compare your dev database to the production database, and hand pick SQL scripts that can be applied to the production database along with your feature deployment.
'* Do consider using a .gitignore file to avoid committing certain files - refer to the docs for mere info.
I suppose you should use the Package Creator
Also have a look here: http://docs.composite.net/Configuration/C1-and-Version-Control
I have been asked by a client to make amends to their site using the custom CS system that was built for them (by somebody else). Making the changes is not a problem but they want the changed to be viewed on a test server before going live and the only way I can think of doing that is by pulling the entire site down, duplicating and reconnecting databases and uploading it to a test server. Then I would have to make all the changes twice which isn't really ideal.
Does anyone know of a way to do this that isn't such a ball ache? There's hundreds of files and data tables as you would expect with a custom CMS and for changes that would only take a few hours to do duplicating the entire site seems a tad unnecessary.
Cheers,
Sam
Does the CMS have "preview mode"?
Typically, in a CMS you make your changes using the content editing interface, save the changes, allow authorized users to view the changes in preview mode, and then change the status to "approved"; this then sends the changes live.
Different products call this by a different name, and have different ways of doing it - but it's worth rooting around in the custom CMS to see if there's something similar.
We have our production server running our website. Then we have a test server which has exact same data but with changes to code to do some new functionality. This web app has over 500 pages.
Is there any program that can
Login to the test site
Crawl through each page and then save the page as html
Compare with the same page saved with live site?
This way we can make sure that new features that we add to our test site will not break the live site when code updates are applied to production.
I am currently trying to use WinHTTrack website copier and then comparing the test and live folders with some code comparison tool like beyond compare. This works ok but there are lot of files changed because of the domain name changes.
Looking forward to ideas / solutions for this problem.
Regards
Have you looked at using Watir for this? It's not exactly the thing you are looking for but it might allow you some more granularity in your tests and ensure the site is functionally identical rather than getting caught up on changing guids, timestamps and all the other things that tend to change across any significant size website from day to day as part of it's standard functionality.
Apparently you can't make consistent, reproduceable builds in your project, can you? I would recommend moving towards that in the long run, it will save you a lot of headaches. That way you would know exactly what was deployed to which server when, so there would be no more need to bend around backwards to get the deployed sources back like this...
I know this is not a direct solution to your problem... but maybe it is worth comparing, whether you would save more in the long run by investing the efforts into your build process now, instead of implementing this workaround (and then improving your build process anyway - because one day you will almost surely need to do that).
wget has a --convert-links option, there are also some options to preserve cookies that might let you do it logged in http://drupal.org/node/118759#comment-664498
use an Offline Downloader, download all files to your computer from both sources, then compare the folder contents using a free tool like Total Commander.
EDIT
Load both of your sources into a CVS, and compare it there.
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Lots of people have things that their systems do for them or for their teams. Source control post-commit hooks are a standard example: have an automated build system that checks out the latest source, compiles, tests, and packages it is a back-office hack that most of us probably use.
What other cool things have you done?
We had one developer in our team who wasn't familiar with the concept of a subversion conflict. He deduced that if he simply deleted all that weird stuff in his code and clicked resolve that everything was ok (i.e. knocking out all the other changes in the file....)
Regardless to say, after the 5th time this occurred, and the 5th time that I had to explain why that defect that I just closed was reoccuring, I wrote a script.
It would diff for the changes to a file to see whether the consecutive checkin deleted all the previous changes and that they were done by the nameless developer.
It would then send an email to the boss with a description of what happened, and how much work was lost during the checkin.
There was no 7th occurrence.
We have a traffic-light that shows whether our daily build succeeds, has failed tests or simply doesn't build.
Also, we have a light bar that lights up for a few seconds whenever we receive an upload from a customer.
We aren't staffed 24x7 but we have critical processes that run throughout the night. We created an in-house alerts system to notify us of serious system issues, failed mission-critical processes, etc. It uses text-to-speech to create a descriptive message and then connects to our automated dialer to call the appropriate people with the message.
Working at a web design company I configured our dev server so we could see a working copy of a project in real time by a sub domain name. So if your name was joe and you were working on project jetfuel you would go to joe.jetfuel.test-example.com and you could see your changes instantly without committing.
This was a simple hack that used sub domain names as a partial directory structure. Our htdocs path looked like this htdocs/tag/project. We had a script (a php app that you would access by setup.test-example.com) that would create a new tag name for you and checkout whatever version you wanted and call the deploy script for that project. If it succeeded it would forward you to the new sub domain. You could then work on this new copy by a samba share.
This worked really well for us since we always deployed to the same linux build and our projects had simple database requirements.
Our original reason for doing this was because our developers worked on all kinds of different platforms. Besides fixing this platform problem this was awesome for viewing changes and testing. We had all kinds of tags ranging from peoples names, trunk versions, test tags, all the way to prototypes like jquery-menu-hack.jetfuel.test-example.com
Now that I look back I wonder how much easier it would have been to run virtual machines.
We had a dev working on a classic ASP site that didn't believe in source control. The code went from his machine straight to the production box. This lead to issues with lost changes or the inability to revert back to a stable version. Since CruiseControl.Net has the ability to monitor a directory, I added a project that actually checked in files whenever they were copied to production. Completely backward from CC.Net's original intent, but we didn't lose any more code.
Put in a pre-commit hook that checks the bug comment refers to an open bug, assigned to the user doing the checkin. (SCMBug can do this).
Then to make life REALLY interesting, spell check the comments!!
The commit comment, and the one in the code. (spell is my buddy)
Run the code through a code formatter set to compayn standard; and diff it to the original: if it's not in company offical format: reject the commit.
Do a coverage test with the unit test build.
Email all mistakes/errors caused to the development team.
I left OUT the name of the developer. They know they did it.
Not exactly hacks, but a couple of must-haves for IT dev work:
If you're using subversion, you've got to use CommitMonitor. (http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/CommitMonitor) It lets you monitor svn repositories for new commits & then review the new commits. Great if you're wanting to stay on top of what your team is doing. Particularly if you have a couple of juniors that need to be watched. ;)
Rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) is also invaluable - we have complete backup snapshots of our entire filesystem every four hours going back 2 years, and every day beyond that. It's like a data cube for your filesystem! The peace of mind this gives is pure bliss. :)
Hardly a hack, but back in the day, on our speedy VAX 11/730, our overnight process would print the file "BLAMMO.TXT" on the printer if something went amiss. Every morning, the first stop was the printer when coming in.
Back in the dotCom days about 9 years ago, I had to hack a failover system between two different locations. We had a funky setup with a powerbuilder front end website, and powerbuilder managment tool. Data was stored in MSSQL 7.0. The webservers used IPX to communicate to the SQL Servers (don't ask). Anyway, I was responsbile for coming up with a failover plan.
I ended up hacking together some linux boxes, and had them run our external DNS. One at each location. We had a remote site w/ webserver, and sql server I got SQL transaction replication working over a 128k ISDN IPX connection (of all things). Then built a monitoring tool at our production site to send packets out to various upstream network handoffs. If we experienced more than 20% outage the primary site, the monitoring tool ran a perl script on the Debian box to change DNS and point to our 2ndary. Our secondary had a heartbeat w/ our primary DNS, and monitoring station. It would duplicate records unless it lost both connections then it would roll over to pointing DNS to backup location.
The primary site would shut down the SQL server at the primary location to break replication. Automated site to site failover using 128k ISDN IPX connection :)
Back at my previous job, we had to audit many tables for data changes (inserts, updates and deletes). Our support crew had to be able to search through this data to find changes that users made.
The temporary solution that had become semi-permanent was to store each non-select query. However this was a large system, that the table would grow by about 1.5GB a day.
The solution I came up with was to create a script that for all tables in an external list, created the appropriate triggers that audit each table, row, column, before and after, when and by whom and store it in our new audit table. This table grew by about 10% the size of the older version and stored much more usable data. It enabled us to create a UI to search and view every change made to our data, without requiring any knowledge of SQL for our support team or business users.
This is at a lesser level, but I am fairly proud of a make file I wrote for compiling code for my research. It only needs to be given your source and header file names that can take care of the rest all by itself (though it does make the one assumption that you will not be compiling any header files into objects, only source files get compiled). The other downsides are the fact that it relies on the GNU make program's second expansion feature, so I don't know if it works on other make programs. Additionally the compiler used needs to support something similar to gcc's -MM feature. Here is hoping that no one laughs at it.
-include prereqs.mk
HEADERS=$(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.h $(SRC_DIR)/gs_structs.h
SOURCES=$(SRC_DIR)/main.cpp $(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.cpp
OBJECTS=$(patsubst $(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SOURCES))
release: FLAGS=$(GEN_FLAGS)$(OPT_FLAGS)
release: $(OBJECTS) prereqs.mk
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(LINKER_FLAGS) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $(EXECUTABLE) $(OBJECTS)
prereqs.mk: $(SOURCES) $(HEADERS)
$(CXX) $(DIR_FLAGS) $(MAKE_FLAG) $(SOURCES) | sed 's,\([abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_]*\).o:,\1= \\\n,' > $#
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(OBJECTS): $$($$(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,%,$$#))
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(NO_LINK_FLAG) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $# $(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$#)
Obviously I dropped the definition of a number of variables, but I think it gets the idea across.
Since my coding tools and style are compatible with the requirements of this script I like to use it. All I need to do to add (a) new piece(s) of source code is add its name(s) to the appropriate variable and the rest is taken care of.
We have Twitter accounts for many projects which tweet things like commit messages, notices from builds, failed unit tests, deployments, bug tracking activity - any kind of event associated with the project. Running a client like Twitter Gwibber (which displays a pop-up for each new status) is a great way to stay in touch with the activity on the projects you are interested. Using Twitter is good as you can take advantage of all the 3rd party apps - such as the iPhone clients.
Add commit-hook check for VRML/3d-model files with absolute path to textures/images. f:/maya/my-textures/newproject/xxxx.png just doesn't belong on the server.
Back in the 1993, when source control systems were really expensive and unwieldy, the company I worked about had an in-house source control built as 4DOS scripts. It wasn't as sofisticated as most current source control systems, for example it didn't have branching or integrates, but it did the basic job of supporting revisions history, checkout/checkin and rudimentary conflict resolution.