Best Way for Stage/Prod Sync

manny

Hi,
If you have published your community, you are for sure not done with developing your community.

Normally, it is convenient to have a staging environment for developing and testing purposes. For example, if we have updated and customized the community on stage, is it a good idea to push it into production?
Because database and code might be affected by updating extensions/flarum. However content and settings of both communities on stage and prod are different and they are also saved in the database.

In that way, it is not easy to sync production while testing and developing on stage because content and extensions are mixed in database.

How would you continue to develop your community once your community is live? What workflow would you suggest?

luceos

For my clients I develop locally. When I'm satisfied I push my changes to git. Which I pull in production. I only commit the composer.lock not the vendor folder because php versions might differ.

I've applied many other ways of pushing to production. For my critical applications I use a full fledged ci pipeline including auto deployment to production using ansible, it's harder to set up and requires a great code coverage. Missing code coverage on flarum and extensions is also the reason I am not using such an extensive process.

If there's any other question feel free to raise it.

manny

I have just applied your way and it worked well. Thanks for the explanation.
Is it also needed to add composer.json?

luceos

manny yes i would most certainly include the composer.json. In fact your can keep all of your files in git, except for the vendor. You can also gitignore (which should be already by default) the storage and assets directory.