I am in the situation where I have been charged with making an application or extension to Umbraco that makes the backend users able to do a migration of their changes on the development site to the live site. This migration is supposed to happen once a day, or when the backend users press a button in the backend.
I am aware that Umbraco offers this in the Courier package, but apparently it doesn't work well enough for this case.
A few more details:
The development and live site both reside on the same server and so do their databases. The data will simply need to be transferred from one folder to another and the same with the tables in the database.
As I can see there are two methods of going about this.
1) You do a full migration, where you basically do a teardown of the live database and update it to the new version. You then copy over all the files you need as well.
2) You create a package containing the document types and so on you have changed on your developer site and load that package on the live site.
The problem with number 1 is that it seems you have to republish the entire site when you have done the transfer. As far as I have understood you can do this with a webservice, but I would prefer it if I could use a console app instead.
My question is then:
Is there a way to create packages programmatically and load them in the same way or what would be the best way to achieve this migration programmatically?
Any suggestions would be much appreciated as I am kind of at a loss for a way to do this :)
EDIT
I ended up actually doing a complete mirroring in the sense that I used Robocopy to transfer all the files that had been changed in the folders, and then I did a backup of the development site with a SQL command, and then I restored it on the live database using the RESTORE SQL command.
A few settings needed to be done in the SQL commands, but it runs smoothly and a complete transfer takes down to 10 seconds depending on the number of files that have been changed.
One last thing. If you want the changes to be visible you need Umbraco to be reloaded. This you can do by modifying the web.config file, either manually or by setting it's LastWriteTime programmatically.
You can always create a usercontrol that will handle the republishing of the entire site for you, this you can call from your console app.
You could also join the Courier 2 beta program, which is indeed good enough (for features anyway, I haven't tested it myself).
Another route could be to offer all of the nodes as a xml feed and use the scheduling feature of CMSImport to migrate nodes automatically.
This is a tough one, there's a lot of options an no silver bullet yet. I have good hopes that Courier 2 will be perfect for this and am eagerly awaiting its release.
Related
Recently I built an rails app for a local business. They like this app so much that they've gotten a couple of other local businesses interested in having their own version of the app.
Here lies the problem that Im uncertain how to fix. The core business logic behind the app would be the same for these new and future customers(about 80% of the code). Whereas each customer would have their own static pages, as well as their own stylesheets.
Ive thought about multi-tenancy, but these guys are picky enough that it honestly seems easier to build the app function the way they want, as opposed to building around DB stored customer preferences(perhaps I'm wrong here).
I would like configure this application so that I can push changes to the core business logic without overwriting the customer specific portions of the site. Perhaps creating a second repo which only contains the customer specific content.
How do I configure this app/Git repo so that I can personalize the app without creating a bunch of parallel repos?
As Meagar pointed out the solution to this scenario is to encapsulate the core business logic of these applications into a Gem that can be reused later down the road.
So, my cohorts and I have been doing some development with Phonegap +jQueryMobile for an application we've been planning to rollout. We switched off doing this natively for iOS and Android, since its mostly html anyway, and phone gap seemed like a great way to do this without having to write a whole bunch of platform specific code (although we're more or less newbs when it comes to this type of development.)
Previously, all the html, javascript, etc, was going to be housed in the app itself. For the most part, this seemed to work for us, and we advanced our design/testing/etc accordingly. However, things have changed in our approach. For each of our customers (once they go through a log-in/authentication) has a 'starting' html file (essentially 'their' index.html) that is specific to said customer. This was different from before where everyone had the same files.
Now I've played around with storing certain scripts on the web server to try and off-set opening the html running on the server, but it's not really that useful when trying to integrate some of the functionality like the camera or some of the other plugins we're trying to use. It's essentially a form-based application, so this is the ONLY file that will change from customer to customer. Also, this will not be something that changes frequently. For the most part, it will be setup for a customer ONCE AND ONLY ONCE, and it truly is unlikely to change.
Is there a way to more or less pull down this html file from a web server to replace the one that is stored internally in the app, and then load that version? Would doing something like that (if its even possible) violate Apple's or Google's App guidelines? Or is what I'm describing not even possible in the framework?
The only other thing I can think of would be to change the stored 'index.html' file to not load any of the form itself, but rather make ajax (or equivalent) calls to do so, but I've been told by our developer working the web design side of things that it would be a huge pain.
Any insight/knowledge would be appreciated.
If you really need to do this (I don't quite understand why), I think your best bet is to go the AJAX route. At least Apple does not look kindly on applications that update themselves without going through the App Store submission process.
You can do the same index.html for all and a script config.js that be the responsible of load/unload resources/html of each user at app start.
All you need to do then is save that config JSON values in localstorage and go.
My friend has setting up a database for a Ragnarok Online server, and he wants me to code the relative website, which is going to use some of that data (and obviously, i'll have to add tables for the news system, website accounts, etc). Since i'm learning RoR i was going to do it that way.
I have a few "best practice" questions related to this :
Should I create a different database for the website, since it's going to have its particular data alongside the game data ? (i already have a few clues to link multiple databases with Rails, but that seems too much of a hassle for what it is).
If not, do i have to create Model/Controller for each of the tables composing the database, despite the fact that i'm not going to use 90% of it ? Or just the ones that i need ?
An example of this problem : the game database has its own "user" table, but i have to have another "user" table for the website, and do some Joins between those two. So, what's the best practice here ?
Uhm, best practice is not making your own user table. This will cause you much pain. Best practice? Use an API. Expose the game's database in some way to your website, and fetch that info with external requests in your web application.
The reason why making a second user table is a hassle:
1) You'll constantly have to update it, pulling data from the original
to keep it up-to-date.
And I mean furthermore, you're gonna have to create a CRON job or something pulling data from that original table to keep it up to date. Yuck. Also what if that CRON job makes a mistake? (It will)
2) It's almost inevitable that there will be inconsistencies if two
separate tables are maintained. Are you sure your web application is
really fail-proof?
Update:
What you're gonna need is essentially a second Rails application that acts as a REST API for that database. For a good idea of what REST is, I'd read through this to get you started: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
Once you have a good understanding of that, start making your app, and test if it's working by using tools like cURL to send requests to your API.
Once you have that done, I'd take a look into the Ruby rest-client gem like Nobita mentioned. This is what you're going to use from your web application to request information from your API application.
Just let me note, I think this would be a terrible first Rails project, unless you're already really well versed in other web development tools, preferably MVC frameworks.
I'm searching for something of which I don't really know the name of.
From time to time, I have to develop a small tool for a small group of users which is basically a web frontend to one or two database tables. It's very basic and something which one could do in a spreadsheet (without the problem that only one user can have the file open at a time and something like Sharepoint is not available) or for what one would have chosen MS Access in the 90s. Google Docs would also be possible, but we'd like to keep our data in-house. (I for myself just use phpMyAdmin for that, but it's not suitable for not tech-savvy end-users.)
So I'm looking for a tool which generates/provides a forms-based Web interface for simple models or database schemes that I create. First, is there a common name for such a thing? And second, does anyone have recommendations (preferably open source and/or free)? The closest thing I've come to is the scaffold generator in Ruby on Rails, but it's very basic and not optimal since it's only designed for generating prototype could which one should edit later, and last time I have looked at it, it was not possible to differently updating your model, i. e. regenerate code for model changes but preserving the manual changes of your code.
Thank you.
You're looking for Web UI Framework. Look into http://agiletoolkit.org/
I am trying to build a CMS I can use to host multiple sites. I know I'm going to end up reinventing the wheel a million times with this project, so I'm thinking about extending an existing open source Ruby on Rails CMS to meet my needs.
One of those needs is to be able to run multiple sites, while using only one code-base. That way, when there's an update I want to make, I can update it in one place, and the change is reflected on all of the sites. I think that this will be able to scale by running multiple instances of the application.
I think that I can use the domain/subdomain to determine which data to display. For example, someone goes to subdomain1.mysite.com and the application looks in the database for the content for subdomain1.
The problem I see is with most pre-built CMS solutions, they are only designed to host one site, including the one I want to use. So the database is structured to work with one site. However, I had the idea that I could overcome this by "creating a new database" for each site, then specifying which database to connect to based on the domain/subdomain as I mentioned above.
I'm thinking of hosting this on Heroku, so I'm wondering what my options for this might be. I'm not very familiar with Amazon S3, or Amazon SimpleDB, but I feel like there's some sort of "cloud database" that would make this solution a lot more realistic, than creating a new MySQL database for each site.
What do you think? Am I thinking about this the wrong way? What advice do you have to offer in this area?
I've worked on a Rails app like this, and the way it was done there was named-based virtual hosts, with db entries for each site running. Each record was scoped to a site if necessary (blog posts, etc.) while users would have access to all sites running out of that db. Administrator permissions could be global or scoped to one or more sites.
You're absolutely correct when you say you'll reinvent the wheel a million times during the project. Plugins will likely require hacking on top of the CMS itself.
In my situation, it ended up being a waste of almost a million dollars of company money to build that codebase to run multiple sites while still being able to cater to the whims of each client site. It worked, but was not very maintainable due to the number of site-specific hacks that subsequently entered the codebase. You may be able to make it work if you don't have to worry about catering to specific client sites running on your platform.
In the end, you're going to need a layer of indirection to handle the different sites regardless of methodology. We ended up putting it in the database itself. If you go with the different-db-for-each-site method you mentioned, you'll put that layer in your code instead. I'm not sure which one is the better method.
I hope you're able to pull this off. I failed.
Also, as I learned today, Heroku offers postgres instead of mysql for rails apps.
There's James Stewart's Theme Support Plugin for Rails 2.3, and lucasefe's themes_for_rails gem for Rails 3+.
I just started using the 2.3 version and it's working well so far.