Staging Drupal: Managing your project in multiple environments

This session familiarized attendees with the tools and processes used to manage development, QA, and production of Drupal projects. Speakers Michelle Lauer (@lauermichelle) and Christopher Pliakas (@cpliakas) presented some solutions for developing a site in multiple environments. I only blogged the part of Christopher. Michelle went too fast to keep up with, I attached the slides so you can read her very useful presentation with lots of examples and tips.

Why Stage Drupal?

• Websites are becoming increasingly complex
• Transition to traditional software delopment cycle
• Multiple engineers/designers working on the same project
• Proper staging avoids confilcts, seperates development from production

Multiple environments

• Proper staging requires development, QA, and production locations
• Each developer has a seperate copy of the application in an isolated location
• Flow is like a pipeline, development -> QA -> production
• Drupal is portable
• How to stage Drupal?

Managing Code With Source Control

• Source Control is essential in the staging process
• Manages changes to the code over time
• We recommend a standard “tags, branches, trunk” repository layout
• We seperate core code from project code
• Rsync –avC –delete –exclude=dir src/ dest

What files should be under Source Control?

• Seperate code from user generated content
• Create “templates” for environment specific files
• Store database snapshots?
• Update code frequently to prevent confilcts
• Check production for modifications

Porting the database

• Database snapshot and files tied together
• Mysqldump, pg_dump, *myadmin applications, contributed solutions
• Restore database, clear cache
• Multisite considerations

Code Release Cycle

• Developers import snapshot, commit changes
• Changes promoted to QA, tested thoroughly
• Admin steps, adding content tested on QA
• Code is tagged
• Code updated on production, manual changes made again
• Alpha, beta, stable release cycles

A systematic approach

• Automate Administrative Tasks Through Code
• Take a snapshot with Demonstration Site module
• Use an update script
• The Site Module (good for every site)