Test and Production deployments

cmwetherell

Hello - new to backend development in general, and definitely new to hosting a forum.

I'm interested in making incremental improvements to my forum (e.g. install extensions) but I also want to be sure I don't break anything.

Is there a good process to follow for creating a test environmentent before making changes to your production Flarum deployment? For example, it seems like if I have a Test environment that I copy to a production environment when I confirm the new feature works the way I'd like it to, wouldn't I lose user activity (e.g. posts)?

I am using an Amazon Lightsail Amazon built LAMP instance.

Thanks for the help!

luceos

cmwetherell you could test changes locally (wamp, valet, docker etc) then commit those changes to git. You can then deploy it to production.

cmwetherell

I'm sure your reply is accurate, but I don't understand one element. How would that not make me lose user posts?

askvortsov

cmwetherell posts are all stored in the database. As long as you aren't modifying the database, you should be fine installing / removing extensions.

cmwetherell

It makes a lot of sense once you understand it 😄

Wadera

Be aware that most extensions playing with database as well (adding some tables, changing users / posts etc).
So most likely you want to take a full backup of your forum (files and database) and restore it on side (on local host / docker / etc). Don't use your prod database on dev environment.

The best way is to change your system hosts file (or create subdomain like: dev.myforum.tdl and add DNS entries for it. I prefer localhost option / behind your firewall, as if you do some debug options it's better that no one other than you can access to your forum), change domain, database in your forum config file and play with your fully separate dev environment 😉