I'm investigating Grails vs. other Agile web frameworks, and one key use case I'm trying to support is the ability to modify controllers and install plugins post deployment. It appears that this isn't possible with Grails, but I want to make sure before I write it off.
As far as modifying controllers goes, it would be sufficient if the Groovlet behavior existed (compile-on-demand).
As far as plugin installs go, I understand this may be a long shot, but I thought I'd check to be sure.
For your information, I need this because I work on a product that requires a little site-specific customization, such as adding validation of simple meta-data, integrating with customer security environments, and maybe even including new controllers/pages quickly.
Out of the box, no, grails doesn't really support what you want. There may be ways to customize it but I've never looked into it. A PHP framework might be more of your ally since there is no real deployment process other than copying PHP files to a location.
That said, I personally would prefer a strict set of deployment policies. And honestly, deploying changes with Grails is as simple as running the 'grails war' command and copying that war to your servlet container. The site's downtime is negligible and if you have multiple web servers with a load-balancer, your customers should never see down time due to deployments.
Although it's not recommended for complex coding; You could execute groovy code from a string that you could store in database or a file on the fly at run time:
check out Groovy template engine:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Templates
but even then, you are still limited on what you can do or can't do let alone debugging will lack. you may want to consider an interpreted language; few to mention PHP/Perl/Coldfusion.
Related
In Grails 2 we used the "External configuration plugin", which included the method checkNow() for checking and refreshing values from an external config file.
Does it exist a simple approach for doing something similar in Grails 4+? I have seen references to Spring Cloud Config Server, but it seems a bit overkill for me. All I really want to do is be able to (now and then) update a config value in runtime. It could also be purely by a few lines of code, and does not have to originate from changes in the config file. This would avoid having to restart our server for minor changes in config. Thanks!
I'm replying to myself with a ridiculously simple answer: "just change it". Using the console plugin (or any other form of code execution), I can just assign grailsApplication.config.any.property a new value. It won't persist and it won't update any listeners or anything. But it is a glaringly obvious solution that I just assumed wouldn't work due to the getProperty() calls (I interpreted the name as reading from file) and googled discussions about Spring Cloud Config.
So, move on... nothing to see here. Just mild embarrassment :-P
change a config.properties file in a jar / war file in runtime and hotdeploy the changes ?
my requirement is something as follows, we have a "config.properties" in a jar/war file , i have to open the file through a webpage and after the user has made necessary changes to it, i have to update the "config.properties" in jar/war file and hot deploy it. can we achieve this feat ? if so can you please point me to relevant sites/documents so that i can jumpstart on this.
I will strongly recommend your architecht rethink this solution. What you describe should be done through JNDI or a similar technique, not through reloading properties.
Deployments should be considered static - that any given web container allows for magic trickery should not be depended on, and WILL break some day (most likely at the most inconvenient time).
You've got a couple of problems off the top of my head:
ensuring that nothing is holding static references to a java.util.Properties that has previously loaded your config.properties file.
most servlet engines will unpack your war to a working directory so the properties file you load won't be the one in the war, it will be the unpacked one. This means your changes
will be overwritten when you restart the servlet engine because this is typically one of the points the war is unpacked.
While these problems aren't insurmountable I've always found it much easier to implement this sort of behavior by storing the properties in JNDI (as Thorbjørn suggests) or a database (while being careful about the static references I mentioned in point 1).
The JNDI/database solution has the nice side effect of easing deployment into multiple environments because each typically has it's own registry/database.
Even that I agree with the comments explained before, I could suggest one solution:
Apache Commons Configuration extension gives you the posibility to do something like:
config.setReloadingStrategy(new FileChangedReloadingStrategy());
That could make the trick to change the configuration file on a runtime basis with no code at all.
However, like JNDI and other methods of web application configuration, the security is a concern. Be careful on which parameters you can/must be able to configure.
I'm using Umbraco 7.4.x. I've been trying to figure out the best way to do bi-directional deployments.
As in, we have more than one dev working locally, and we have a dev server and a live server. We have single click deploys from local to dev, but that's only code. We were copying up the databases to dev, but now we also have people who need to enter content on dev. This leads us to making changes on dev database as well and copying down the database. We do all this with Version control of course, but still, this is all very inconvenient.
Is there a better approach to this that I'm missing? I tried using usync a few months ago but we'd often run into crashes.
I have heard of Courier, it seems like it would be good for deploying from dev/stage to production, but would that also work for pushing content/doc type changes to our local machines? I wasn't sure as they're not web servers on the internet but just local IIS Express running through Visual Studios
Thanks in advance!
We use uSync (uSync + uSync.ContentEdition - https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/usync/) for moving everything between instances. Give it another shot as it has changed from the point when you're exploring it in the past. It's worth to mention that it requires good configuration on different enviroments to avoid conflicts etc.
You can also use Courier and it's latest version is used by Umbraco Cloud (http://umbraco.io/) which may also interest you as it gives you full control over deployment processes between multiple Umbraco instances.
One option is to have all of your developers set up to work off of the same dev database. On occasion, your developers might have to "Republish the entire site" or reindex the examine indexes to make sure all their cache and TEMP file are up to date. Otherwise, this has worked well for us for many years. One frustrating part of this is that media files uploaded by dev A won't be immediately on the file system for dev B. You should be able to move your media to azure blob storage to work around this problem. There is a package that should help set this up here.
I wouldn't recommend uSync.ContentEdition. I haven't tried it personally, but I have yet to hear a good report about it. uSync on the other hand has been a life saver for us even if it isn't perfect. At this point, we install usync on every site even if we never configure it to read in changes. We like that we can record our changes to document types and datatypes in source control. Working with the shared database setup means that we don't need usync to be reading on our dev and local environments. However, you will need to make sure that your devs all understand usync. If dev A adds a doc type, the usync .def file for that doc type could show up on the file system for dev B. Dev B should not commit that usync file in that situation.
Courier has been working a lot better recently. I wouldn't recommend it unless you are running umbraco 7 and can get the latest version of Courier. Courier is very useful, but you should do a lot of testing with it before you hand it over to a client because Courier gives you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in a big way. It has definitely improved. In Courier for umbraco 6 I used to have to try really hard to deploy without breaking my site. Now, in Courier for umbraco7, I have to try really hard to break it. This is now a viable option for deploying content changes to production. Just make sure you test it heavily before you use it in a production environment.
We have four different environments - dev VMs, dev, QA and prod. All environments have the following setting for the "website" site:
<site name="website" virtualFolder="/" physicalFolder="/"
rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" database="master"
domain="extranet" allowDebug="true" cacheHtml="false"
htmlCacheSize="10MB" registryCacheSize="0" viewStateCacheSize="0"
xslCacheSize="5MB" filteredItemsCacheSize="2MB" enablePreview="true"
enableWebEdit="true" enableDebugger="true"
disableClientData="false" loginPage="/" hostName="www.site.com"
enableFallback="true" enforceVersionPresence="true"/>.
So on VM and prod, www.site.com/en/home/press and www.site.com/en/press work.
But on dev and QA, www.site.com/en/home/press works but www.site.com/en/press doesn't work. (Works with startItem but gets a 404 without it).
This is happening with ISAPI enabled and disabled both (no exceptions).
I am not sure what is going on here or where else to look except to make sure that my start item is in good shape which it seems to be.
What can I do to resolve this? If you need more information please let me know.
Thanks
Try looking at the:
"linkManager" tag in the web.config, there is a property called:
languageEmbedding: asNeeded | always | never
which could be set differently on those solutiuons.
If you have Multi-Language website it is recommended to go with
languageEmbedding: always
Advantages :
Some time in IE8 the Language cookie is destroyed, because of that
the language displayed is change randomly.(We have faced this issue
in our environment) LanguageEmbadding : Always will keep the Information and will work without any Issue.
If you have set asNeeded then First time the Language will be displayed and next time onward it will be hidden. But this will create issue with Google Analytics. In GA you will have 2 diff URL with same page content so your analysis will be unnecessarily divided in to 2 pages.
And Yes you can check if there is any difference is Config files. As Mentioned by Martijn you can use the www.site.com/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx Copy the Config, compare it using any file compare tool like WinMerge etc.
What is the Hierarchy in your project?
Sitecore-Content-home-Press or
Sitecore-Content-home-Home-Press?
In my project the setting you have mentioned has database = web.
I can't add a comment, but as Martijn says you need to compare the configs. Now this should be very easy since you should be using config include files and so the changes between the environments should be very minimal. If you are not using them then you should start using them, it makes life much easier to figure out the differences from default Sitecore installation and will also make your upgrades much easier in the future. Or maybe you are using them for the other environments and that is what is causing the issue?
All About web.config Include Files with the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS
As for comparing the configs, use a file comparison tool like WinMerge as already metioned, that should weed out the differences much more easily.
Also, as Maulik says, default config has: database="web" content="master"
This seems like config differences. Compare the live configs by using www.site.com/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx. This way you can see the actual config which also includes all your /app_config/include/ files
I'm wondering where utility code can be placed, that doesn't cause a restart of container. Updating controllers doesn't cause a container restart & the updated code is available to run (great), but I wanted a more general library/utility place for my utility code.
Putting the code in /utils or in src/groovy does cause a restart on save, at least using Intellij, but I imagine this is the same regardless of where Grails is developed.
Perhaps you have some general info/insights on how Grails does this -- includes new code but doesn't need to restart the container, if that's only special to controllers?
(v. 1.3.7)
You're out of luck out of the box unless you want to use 2.0. The alternative is to turn off auto-reloading and add in something like jrebel. See this blog for details.