So I've been a developer on a one man team for a few years now. I came to recognize the benefit of separating all of the design, html, and css work into the hands of the more gifted individuals, so I started a business, made up of other long-time 1 man teams who were limited to static websites (that looked gorgeous). You can imagine what comes next.
We've been using Zend Framework (PHP applications for most applications, which separates most of the view code from business and data layers, but occasionally one of the designers or front-end guys has to tinker with a model or view script, and I'm starting to have coordination nightmares for who is updating what files and when so we don't overwrite anyone's important changes in the dev environment. (obviously waiting for stability before production deployment)
I work with NetBeans on my local, while the others use dreamweaver. What I'm looking for is a tool that can manage file versions on the dev server, allowing check in/check out, so nobody is working on the same file at the same time. (or better yet, merges changes)
Any suggestions on a good tool for this? Would a CI tool be better or a VCS tool? The only other option I can think of is to work directly on a development server, deploy to a simprod environment, than after testing, move to prod, but I like being able to develop behind a firewall before putting something on the internet. Any recommendations would be helpful.
Thank you.
You are looking for git. Perfect for managing versions and branches, deploying to the dev or prod servers, pretty much anything you can throw at it.
Related
We're planning to select DNN+2sxc for a project for our team.
Normally when it comes to a CMS, I usually fly solo, but in a corporate .Net or Java environment it’s team collaboration, source control, Azure, deployments etc.
With our upcoming project we’re taking one of our main sites (C#/asp.net/razor) and converting it to DNN.
However, I’m currently unsure as to how to approach a CMS in a team development environment?
So in the development phase, we'll have some guys doing styling, others creating 2sxc reusable content templates and others building the actual pages. All at the same time, on the same website. In terms of Git/Visual Studio I'm not sure how it will actually work with relation to the DB especially. This question obviously applies to all CMSes (not just DNN) in a shared development environment.
What is the best practice to do this?
So I prefer to do most development locally, in my own instance (local IIS and local DB), with each individual project (module,theme/skin) in a separate repository. This makes the risk of me breaking someone else, or someone else causing me pain, minimal.
You can use a tool like Polydeploy to automate the deployment from the repository check ins into that upper environment. Requiring that individuals check code into the repository when ready to deploy to a test/uat/prod type environment.
Where it gets tricky is content for sure, I would typically do that in a test/uat environment that will ultimately be pushed to production once it is finalized.
I NEVER source control the DNN instance itself, that's just asking for pain.
This can be quite challenging, especially since some parts are user-data (which shouldn't be re-deployed on development) and other parts are dev.
There is a minimal guide to this here: https://docs.2sxc.org/abyss/enterprise-development/index.html
I've been developing a web app locally on my local MAMP computer for the last few months. Now I am ready to launch it while continuing to add enhancements/fixes. So, I am wondering what is a good way to implement a development AND production server in order to efficiently manage updates, prevent overwrites, and seamlessly add other developers into the workflow. I also want something that has a minimal learning curve for me. Personally, for whatever reason, I've never been able to fully grasp version control systems like Git or SVN so I am hoping for an easier solution until I am able to invest more info the business.
As I see it, the options that I have are:
Spend more time learning Git before launching. And hoping that I don't break anything while further developing my app.
Buy two hosting accounts. One for Dev and one for Prod, where only I can do the deployments into Prod. I suppose I'd have to keep track of all files we've modified in a spreadsheet that are deemed ready for deployment.
Editing right on the FTP (no Dev server).
Are there any other options that you can recommend? I've heard that there are some new types of Web Hosting companies that can do the heavy lifting...
While personally, I have had good experiences using svn/git for multi-developer websites, I can understand your reticence to start relying on something you are not entirely familiar with. Unfortunately, I do believe that is your best option, but failing that, you might try using subdomains. My former employer would create test area on the disk and point beta.thedomainname.com at it. When bug fixes or upgrades were complete and verified to be working in the beta directory, the entire directory would be copied over to the live domain. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked. It certainly is cheaper than buying two hosting accounts.
I am pretty comfortable with the producing web apps now. I am using a NodeJs stack on the back-end and usually have a fair amount of Javascript on the front end. Where I really lack understanding is the deployment process.
What is a typical deployment process?
From what I have gathered in my reading a deployment/build process can include several tasks:
Running through unit-test suites
Concatenating script and CSS files
Version numbering your app
Tracing module dependencies (node_modules)
Pushing it to a remote repo (GitHub)
Instructing 'staging' servers to pull down the latest repo
Instructing 'production' server to pull down the latest repo
This has all left me a little overwhelmed. I don't know whether I should be going into this level of detail for my own projects, it seems like a lot of work! I am using Sublime Text 2 IDE and it seems to have a Build Script process, is this suitable? How does one coordinate all these separate tasks? I'm imagining ideally they would all run at the flick of a switch.
Sorry so many questions, but I need to know how people learnt similar principles. Some of my requirements may be specific to NodeJS but I'm sure processes are similar no matter what choice of stack you are developing in.
First off, let's split the job in two: front-end and back-end stuff. For both, you really want some kind of bulid system, but their goals and scope are vastly different.
For the front-end, you want your source to be as small as possible; concatenate/minify JavaScript, CSS and images. A colleague of mine has written a "compiler", Assetgraph, to do this for you. It has a somewhat seep learning-curve, but it does wonders for your code (our dev-builds are usually ~20 megs, production ~500 k).
As to the back-end, you want contained, easily managed bundles of some sort. We re-package our stuff into debian-packages. As long as the makefile is wired up correctly, you get a lot of the boring build- and deploy-time stuff for free. Here's my (pre-NPM 1.0) Debianizing node programs. I've seen other ways to do this in NPM and on Github, but I haven't looked into them, so I can't speak on their quality.
For testing/pusing around/deploying, we use a rather convoluted combination of Debian package-archives, git-hooks, Jenkins-servers and what not. While I highly recommend using the platforms' native package-manager for rolling out stuff, it can be a bit too much. All in all, we usually deploy staging either automatically (on each git push), or semi-automatic for unstable codebases. Production deployments are always done explicitly.
For the assets I use asereje https://github.com/masylum/asereje
I recently documented my nodejs deployment process in a blog post:
http://pau.calepin.co/how-to-deploy-a-nodejs-application-with-monit-nginx-and-bouncy.html
A build script sounds like a good idea indeed.
What should that build script do?
make sure all the test pass, else exit immediately
concatenate your javascript and css files into one single js/css file and minify them also
increment the version number (unless you decide to set that up yourself manually)
push to the remote repo (which instructs the staging and production servers through a git hook)
This is at least my opinion.
Other resources:
http://howtonode.org/deploying-node-with-spark
http://howtonode.org/deploying-node-upstart-monit
http://dailyjs.com/2010/03/15/hosting-nodejs-apps/
How to deploy node app depencies
I have been given the task to team mange a total refactoring of a webpage, build in PHP.
I'm only the student worker :( so my experience in a team development environment is limited.
Well my question here is how do we best manage the development of the website?
At the moment do we use a SVN for version control, where each dev have a branch.
I am having a dream about mapping [brach name].devserver.com to the given branch of the SVN.
But I’m not sure this is the best way to do it? Would setting up at local development server up on each dev pc be better?
Also if we where to use our Development server for our testing, is mapping to SVN branch be best? Or would a normal ftp be easier?
Any input will be greatly appreciated.
I believe it is pretty good to have a local environment where you can work free of the thought to destroy anything and have clear environment types.
Also, I think it is a good idea to have different branches for development, testing and production. By having this, you have all your finished and tested code in the production environment and finished code but untested in the testing environment. This makes it easy to run tests, show the product and also to develop.
If you're going to work as a manager, ask your team about the technical stuff. They probably have some good ideas to, and it's always good to find out what they like.
This is why distributed version control is gaining more ground.
For more information take a look at bazaar: http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/bazaar_workflows.html
And Joel's Hg Init tutorial: http://hginit.com/
They'll give you a little better understanding about DVCS, and why it's better than using Subversion (IMHO... and a few other thousand programmers). And if you're using DVCS, you can test on the "main" server, you can each install LAMP/WAMP servers and test on your own box, or any variation you can think of. The important thing is to figure out what works best for your team, and do that.
My current project has a development web server and live web server. Developers make changes to files on the dev server and test them (by going to the dev address) and make changes as necessary. When the file or files are ready to go, they are copied to the live server. There is no version control.
As you might expect, there are some problems with this model:
It's hard to keep track of what other programmers have done.
It's hard to keep track of what files should be copied to the live server.
There is no version control.
I'm in a position to make nearly any change I like, but I want it to be the right one! I have been turning this over in my head for quite a while, and I have a solution that might be okay. But I want SO's opinion.
Certainly version control needs to be added. But how should it work with the existing codebase and where should the developers be testing? How can anyone know what needs to be moved to the live server? What other details need to be addressed?
How would you attack this problem?
Supplementary information:
The website is vital, but not mission critical. A small amount of downtime is acceptable.
There are very few developers. (Right now, only 4.)
History: Before I started, the project used Visual Source Safe. This was a sufficiently bad experience that they quit using it and abandoned version control.
The project is an ASP.NET (C#) website.
This seems like a question that may have a complicated answer. Thanks for thinking about it!
Use source control. Even VSS is better than nothing, but there are plenty of better alternatives, free or otherwise. Simple enough option in Subversion, with a plugin like VisualSVN to integrate with Visual Studio.
Developers' initial testing should just use their own local development web servers that VS will fire up, or their own local IIS instances.
Add a web deployment project to pre-compile the website, and exclude it from the debug build configuration so it doesn't slow everyone down when they build.
When you want to deploy, deploy the entire output of the web deployment project built in release mode. Don't do it piecemeal, otherwise you'll never know what's there.