Best Practices for Managing Communities like flarum

Winged_Dev

Hi everyone,

I’m reaching out for advice regarding the best practices for managing and deploying a community platform like Flarum.

Currently, I’ve deployed flarum directly onto my hosting server without any deployment system like Git. Everything is straight on the server, and if I want to make any modifications, I usually do it via SSH or through the admin panel.

Here’s the situation:

• I have multiple products running on the same hosting account, each with different backends.

• flarum is working fine, but the setup is becoming bulky and harder to manage.

• There’s no version control system in place, and I’m concerned about scalability, maintainability, and disaster recovery.

My question is: What’s the industry standard practice for managing such community platforms?

• Do most people use GitHub for version control and deployment?

• Is it common to deploy changes via Git and keep the hosting server synced with the repository?

• Or is my current approach of directly managing files on the server acceptable for a setup like this?

I’d really appreciate insights from others who have managed similar setups or have expertise in DevOps for such platforms.

Thanks in advance for your guidance!

luceos

The industry standard is up to intepretation.

What I like to do is to use Git and CI/CD. Making changes to dependencies (or files) on the production environment should be strictly prohibited. Changes should be applied locally, pushed to Git, CI-tested, maybe get a pass on a staging environment (when working with clients or stakeholders) and then be deployed (CD), for instance by using tags or a production branch.

Assets like uploads should be send to a CDN/Bucket.
Database should be periodically backed up and the server ought to be redundant