What's best Drupal deployment strategy? [close

Question

I am working on my first Drupal project on XAMPP in my MacBook. It's a prototype and receives positive feedback from my client.

I am going to deploy the project on a Linux VPS two weeks later. Is there a better way than 're-do'ing everything on the server from scratch?

• install Drupal
• download modules (CCK, Views, Date, Calendar)
• create the Contents
• ...

Thanks

Answer 1

If you're new to deployment (and or Drupal) then be sure to do everything in one lump. You have to be quite careful once there are users effecting content while you are working on another copy.

It is possible to leave the tables that relate to actual content, taxonomy, users, etc. rather than their structure. Then push the ones relating to configuration. However, this add an order of magnitude of complexity.

Apologies if deployment is something old hat to you, thus this is vaguely insulting.

Answer 2

I don't work with Drupal, but I do work with Joomla a lot. I deploy by archiving all the files in the web root (tar and gzip in my case, but you could use zip) and then uploading and expanding that archive on the production server. I then take a SQL dump (mysqldump -u user -h host -p databasename > dump.sql), upload that, and use the reverse command to insert the data (mysql -u produser -h prodDBserver -p prodDatabase < dump.sql). If you don't have shell access you can upload the files one at a time and write a PHP script to import dump.sql.

Answer 3

A couple of tips:

• Use source control, NOT FTP/etc., for the files. It doesn't matter what you use; we tend to spin up an Unfuddle.com subversion account for each client so they have a place to log bugs as well, but the critical first step is getting the full source tree of your site into version control. When changes are made on the testing server or staging server, you see if they work, you commit, then you update on the live server. Rollbacks and deployment gets a lot, lot simpler. For clusters of multiple webheads you can repeat the process, or rsync from a single 'canonical' server.

• If you use SVN, though, you can also use CVS checkouts of Drupal and other modules/themes and the SVN/CVS metadata will be able to live beside each other happily.

• For bulky folders like the files directory, use a symlink in the 'proper' location to point to a server-side directory outside of the webroot. That lets your source control repo include all the code and a symlink, instead of all the code and all the files users have uploaded.

• Databases are trickier; cleaning up the dev/staging DB and pushing it to live is easiest for the initial rollout but there are a few wrinkles when doing incremental DB updates if users on the live site are also generating content.

I did a presentation on Drupal deployment best practices last year. Feel free to check the slides out.

Answer 4

Features.module is an extremely powerful tool for managing Drupal configuration changes.

Content Types, CCK settings, Views, Drupal Variables, Contexts, Imagecache presets, Menus, Taxonomies, and Permissions can all be rolled into a feature, which can be checked into version control. From there, deploying a new site, or pushing changes to an existing one, is easily managed with the Features UI or Drush.

Make sure you install Strongarm.module for exporting drupal config that gets stored in your Variables table. You can also static content/nodes (ie: about us, faqs, etc) into Features by installing uuid_features.module.

Hands down, this is the best way to work with other developers on the same site, and to move your site from Development to Testing to Staging and Production.

Answer 5

I'm surprised that no one mentioned the Deployment module. Here is an excerpt from its project page:

... designed to allow users to easily stage content from one Drupal site to another. Deploy automatically manages dependencies between entities (like node references). It is designed to have a rich API which can be easily extended to be used in a variety of content staging situations.

Answer 6

A good strategy that I have found and am currently implementing is to use a combination of the deploy module to migrate my content, and then drush along with dbscripts to merge and update the core and modules. It takes care of database merging even if you have live content, security and module updates, and I currently have mine set up to work with svn.