XF 1.5 Deployment to Prod from test

[Architect]

Hi,
This question may have been asked earlier and already answered but I could not find one.
Can someone point me to available resources to deploy from test site to a new prod. I have got everything ready in my test environment. Now will be buying a new hosting site and deploy.

Can we simply follow the directions that were given to develop test from Prod but skip migration of user data and forum content as this would be relevant the the specific site/environment?

If the only way is to install on Prod from scratch then what content/directories and tables should I plan to migrate as I had some addons installed along with template changes.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Many thanks.

 

[Paul B]

Is the test site already populated with content or do you need to do an import?

If the former, just copy the database and server files from the test server to the live server.

The general guide for doing test installs and imports is here: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/importing-guidelines.25325/

 

[Architect]

Thanks Brogan for your reply. The test site just has some test content and few test users. How about if I remove the test content and some of the test users after I copy the database and server files to prod? Do you know any way to reset the forum instead of manually deleting individual forum content?

Thanks.

 

[Paul B]

There is no option to reset the content.

I believe there is a thread somewhere with all of the queries which must be run to manually delete the content, but it's not something we recommend.

 

[Architect]

install and import process appears to be straight forward. Though have a question, I do not plan to impart any content other than the style. Do I have to manually create every single user custom fields in the prod? Similar to what I did when created first time in test?

Thanks.

 

[Paul B]

If you are not going to import the database and want those custom user fields to be available in the production site, you will have to recreate them.

They aren't part of the style.

 

[Architect]

That's what I thought. Thanks Brogan for your quick response as always.
Since I don't have much content on the site, I may plan to move the whole test to Prod, delete all test data and take the baseline backup for future installations.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Perhaps I can piggyback on this thread. We have a very similar situation except that we have a large live site running vBulletin and we are nearing the end of the development of our XenForo site. @Slavik did an initial import for development of the new site and will, I believe do the final import when we shut down the current site. We have installed Material Design from @ThemeHouse and we have a fairly large wiki from @pegasus. We also have add ons from @AndyB, @Xon, @au lait and others for a total of 39 add ons (not all of them active).

If I export all of those add-ons and also have ThemeHouse help export the style work, will we be able to reimport the environment we have developed after importing our current site contents? I may have naively thought that would work.

If we need to recreate everything we have done, our site will be down for a significant period while we redo all the configurations, user fields, etc.

 

[Architect]

Hi Tom,

I started recreating the site from scratch yesterday. My idea was to create an initial baseline software and database plus installed all the addons and imported the style and phrases from development. I had to manually create the structure of the forum and homepage. I basically made a clone copy of development env manually with no content and users. I created all this in my local environment and took DB and xenforo back ups. Now I can easily deploy it to prod and any other environment within few minutes by migrating the site and exporting the DB. I don't have any content to import but if you do, then you can import it to your baseline and create another backup. This should siginificantly reduce the downtime of your servers.

All above steps took 2-3 hours on my end.

Thanks.

 

[Architect]

Hi Tom,

Since you have more addons, it may take a bit more time on your end.

Also since it's agile development and deployment, you may also want to have a deployment strategy and plan in case you plan to maintain more than one environment. I am thinking of having a dev, prod and post prod.

 

[Paul B]

The recommended approach towards multiple test imports is outlined in this thread: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/importing-guidelines.25325/

If you don't have a clean backup you can use, you will need to look at an alternative approach.

 

[Slavik]

If we need to recreate everything we have done, our site will be down for a significant period while we redo all the configurations, user fields, etc.

I am able to re-import over your existing test without requiring you to re-do addons, styles, options etc, I forget if you had any custom imported data without looking at your import notes but those wouldn't be too much to sort either.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Thanks. We have some custom fields that got converted to badges from similar badges on vB but not a lot of stuff like that. You did several appropriate mappings on the first import.

I will relax a bit on this then. The only problem we had before was the volume of attachments and the systems on two different servers. I think we have fixed the site topology since then, so that should be easier than before.

I will still need to work out all the image relationships with attachments, XMG and VaultWiki all using different approaches. I still want to have content addressable images to eliminate duplicates, but that can be done after the deployment.