I am in the process of choosing a CMS system for a few websites we are about to create. We're running a Microsoft environment, so we're only looking at .NET systems, specifically Orchard or Umbraco. We will be running the sites on a cluster running Web Farm Framework 2.0. We have been testing this configuration with Umbraco but have had some issues that essentially have made it impossible for us to run it on WFF. We have not tested this setup with Orchard yet.
Is it possible to run these systems on WFF in your experience, and if so do you have any advice on common pitfalls?
PS. Some more details on our issues with Umbraco on WFF. I won't go into all the various problems we've had, but as an example: We have issues with synching of physical resources between servers and adding data in the database that relies on that synching.
Umbraco can run in a load-balanced environment. I've not dealt with Web Farm Framework myself, and Googling for "umbraco "web farm framework"" yields very little except this question, but the recommended setup for a load-balanced Umbraco site is as per these guidelines over on the Our.Umbraco community wiki.
In our firm we use the SAN/NAS configuration for large websites which avoids file conflicts - two or more IIS instances, one directory on a SAN/NAS share serving up the website itself.
For Web Farm Framework I'm guessing you'll need to run a similar setup to the distributed file system (DFS) configuration for Umbraco. Set up one server behind the load-balancer as the "master" for doing content edits, and let WFF handle the syncing from master to slave/s instead of DFS.
HTH,
Benjamin
This is for Umbraco 4.7x
Use the configuration editor on the webfarm controller server to include the skipDirective for the umbraco temp directory. Umbraco doesn't like the temp directory being synchronized.
<skip name="logFiles" skipDirective="objectName=dirPath,absolutePath=.TEMP.*" />
I'm having a hard time finding the right syntax for absolutePath.
Also edit the /config/umbracoSettings.config file, and include your servers in the following section:
<distributedCall enable="true"> <user>0</user>
<servers>
<server>server1.mywebsite.com</server>
<server>server2.mywebsite.com</server>
<server>server3.mywebsite.com</server>
</servers>
</distributedCall>
Here a link to our.umbraco.org: Installing Umbraco for load balanced environments
Related
I'm deploying my site to Umbraco Cloud and that's working fine, but I want to deploy to my own live server without Umbraco CLoud services.
I know the process of Umbraco cloud service.
If I change any content on local Umbraco that can effect on server system without Umbraco as a service, is there any alternate process to do that?
I have not used Umbraco as a Service but when hosting sites yourselves there is no standard feature to push content changes from one environment to another.
Umbraco offer A closed-source licensed package Courier that is designed to manage the deployment of content:
https://umbraco.com/products-and-support/courier/
Additionally you may wish to investigate uSync.Content. I have used uSync (for document types ect.) with great success but have not used the Content edition: https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/usynccontentedition/
The final, more hands on, approach is to do a database compare between environments to generate update scripts that can be applied but this does require a good understanding of the Umbraco schema to avoid overwriting/loosing content.
I have been trying to get Umbraco working in a web role environment (web services) in Azure, but the site errors when you try and access it, saying that config/trees.config is not accessible.
These are the steps i carried out:
Create a new empty MVC4 project in Visual Studio 2013
Install Umbraco v7.1.8 from nuget
Run up and configure using a new azure SQL database.
Added in the umbraco folders to the solution.
Added an azure web services project to the solution.
Added the existing MVC umbraco project to the azure role profiles.
Published to Azure staging area.
The site starts up with the usual 'Looks like there is still work to do' screen in the full Azure emulator in visual studio with multiple role instances. However fails to run up when hosted in Azure.
I am currently assuming that the issue is that the site root does not have write access when hosted in Azure, so the IIS worker process cannot write to the trees.config file.
I found an article where you can add a 'startup.bat' file, with the following:
echo "starting startup task" >> log.txt
%windir%\system32\Icacls.exe .. \* /T /grant "Network Service":(F) > log.txt
But this stops the role instances for starting up at all in both the emulator and when hosting in azure.
Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated
I would suggest using a VM instead of a web role for hosting Umbraco in Azure, particularly since Umbraco is needing local write access to persist.
Web roles expect your application to be stateless, meaning no writing or persisting anything to the actual file system. This guarantee allows Azure to make certain assumptions so that it can load balance and scale the application correctly (it basically saves a master copy and then re-deploys it fresh as it scales up or makes updates, etc. This works great for web apps that were created with this in mind, but if not, then a VMs allows you to scale UP without worrying about your app needing to work a certain way to properly scale OUT under a load balancer (which is what web roles are made to help you do).
So, basically I would suggest installing to a Virtual Machine. It's still in the cloud, and you get all the cloud benefits of on-demand scaling of the infrastructure. In addition, I would expect Virtual Machines to be a supported install of Umbraco, where a web role install would not. Hope that helps!
I created an asp.net mvc project in VS. I created an azure cloud service. Within the VS solution I added an azure project to enable me to publish to my cloud service. The cloud service has a web role and it’s published to a production environment. When I publish the project, I have my domain .cloudapp.net and I can then view my published project from a browser.
Job done. All good so far.
What I’m unclear on (and this is partly because my azure and asp.net mvc knowledge is limited) is where the project files actually reside (and the file/folder structure) and how to access them? I know they are on an IIS server somewhere but that’s about it.
With ‘traditional’ websites you have a webserver, a wwwroot folder and you stick your web pages etc into them and can see/access them through ftp etc.
Apart from wanting to know the answer to the above question I actually want to farm out the web ui (view) part to a web developer whilst I concentrate on the back end stuff. He doesn’t have visual studio so I’m unclear on how to best approach this?
I’ve noticed on the windows azure publish summary within my solution that you can enable remote desktop and enable web deploy which I suspect may be of help to me but as the solution is all working fine at the moment and I’m demoing it to a client tomorrow I’m a bit reluctant to make any last minute changes..as I’m sure we’ve all suffered the consequences of that before.
What I’m unclear on is where the project files actually reside
(and the file/folder structure) and how to access them?
As you have mentioned, these files reside on the server itself. If you connect to your server via Remote Desktop, you can see the files under D:\sitesroot folder (actual name of the folder can be found by launching IIS Manager on that server).
Having said that, it is not recommended to make changes to the files directly on the server. This is because if your server goes bad for any reason, Microsoft will provision a new server for you and it takes the code from the package file when you last deployed your application. This the changes you have made on that server will be lost.
Regarding your other question about having somebody focus on front-end development, I'm pretty sure you don't want him to working on production server directly. I'm assuming you have a centralized code repository somewhere where everybody checks in their code and then you build stuff and then deploy it.
I've created a basic website using the Orchard CMS, and attempted to deploy it to my shared host, Softsys, using Web Matrix (via FTP). Currently, the site technically "works", however it looks like all styling has been removed (even from the dashboard).
Is there a step or files that I missed while deploying the site? I know "Web Deploy" is probably the preferred method of deploying, but I'm pretty new to this, and was not sure what the login specifics were, or how to obtain them for web deploy.
Here is a screenshot of what the site currently looks like deployed:
Edit: it turns out that the problem was on my host's side, for some reason the virtual directory was not being created properly - I still am curious what the proper/best practice method to deploying is however.
It looks like you have no theme applied. Check whether you have your theme existing in ~/Themes folder and properly enabled in the admin Dashboard. Maybe the /Themes folder content hasn't been copied?
UPDATE
If your hosting provider allows the option to deploy sites via WebDeploy - that would be the best one.
The easiest and most straightforward way to deploy Orchard site is to:
Have the ASP.NET application properly configured in IIS and accessible. If you use hosting - provider does that for you. If you'd have a dedicated server - you have to set up an application yourself.
Grab the deployment package from Codeplex, or build one from the sources.
Copy the whole package to your site's root (via FTP or WebDeploy).
Run it and proceed with the setup.
Basically - these are the same steps as for every "ordinary" ASP.NET application.
You probably need to set IIS user to have write access to some of the folders: Themes, Media and App_Data.
I've a site that I'd like to publish to a co-located live server. I'm finding this simple task quite hard.
My problems begin with the Web Deploy tool (1.1) giving me a 401 Unauthorized as the adminstrator because port :8172 comes up in the errors and this port is blocked - but the documentation says "The default ListenURL is http://+:80/MsDeployAgentService"!
I'm loathe to open another port and I've little patience these days so I thought bu66er it, I'll create a Web Deploy package and import it into IIS on the server over RDP.
I notice first that Visual Studio doesn't use a dialog box to gather settings, or use my Publish profiles but seems to use a tab in the project properties, although I think these are ignored when importing the package anyway?
I'm now sitting in the import wizard with Application Path and Connection String. I've cleared the conn string as I think this is for some ASP stuff I don't use but when I enter nothing in the Application Path, the wizard barks at me saying that basically I'm a weirdo because most people publish to folders beneath the root site.
Now, I want my site to be site.com/Home/About and not site.com/subfolder/Home/About and I think being an MVC routed site that a subfolder will introduce other headaches. Should I go ahead and use the root?
Finally, I also want to publish a web service to www.site.com/services/soap which I think IIS can handle.
While typing this question, Amazon have delivered my IIS 7 Resource Kit, and I've been scouring the internet but actually I'm getting more confused.
Comment here seems to show consensus opinion that Publish isn't for production sites and that real men roll their own.
ASP.NET website 'Publish' vs Web Deployment Project
...I guess this was pre- Web Deployment Tool era?
I'm going to experiment on a spare box for now but any assistance is welcome.
Luke
UPDATE
The site was imported (to the root) manually with Web Deploy and it worked. If you get the error "There is a duplicate 'system.web.extensions/scripting/scriptResourceHandler' " its because your app pool is 4.0 and should be 2.0.
If you are using VS 2010, may I recommend Scott Hanselman's Web Debloyment Made Awesome?
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WebDeploymentMadeAwesomeIfYoureUsingXCopyYoureDoingItWrong.aspx
Even if you are using VS2008, there are nice concepts there that will probably help.
I've experienced the same frustration and trouble with this as well. Coming from a Java web background where we can package everything as a single WAR and toss it on the server, the deployment process with ASP.NET seems archaic.
I currently have a python script that uses FTP to transfer the needed files to my test instance on the remote server. I have another python script that transfers those files to my live site. These scripts are smart enough to take care of differences between some of the configuration files etc..
I've found it much easier than trying to setup permissions or using the Microsoft deploy tools.
Hi you can use filezilla software to upload