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c_costel

clarkwinkelmann Wow thanks for this explanation. I had no idea that the assets dir would be changed so often. It's actually shading quite some light on how flarum works.

This raises a more important questions now.

This is what I am trying to do:

Setup dev environment on local machine.
Deploy though git the dev flarum to production.
Write an oAuth extension on dev.
Deploy it to production
Profit from a global oAuth system.

Questions:

Should I version control or ignore the assets directory?
Will I be able to rebuild the flarum (incl. assets) on production?
Is this a good way in general? Or should I get the flarum/core repo?

Would appreciate if you can shade some light on this as well.

c_costel

This is how I plan my .gitignore to look like:

/assets/avatars/*
/assets/*.js
/assets/*.css
storage/
vendor/
config.php
.DS_Store
.idea

clarkwinkelmann

c_costel I dont really know ?

I use the standard composer-on-the-server way to install and update Flarum at the moment.

You know you can already manage extensions separately from core and update them through packagist/composer to your production server ?

I've seen other having success with Docker. Maybe they can help better ?

c_costel

clarkwinkelmann Docker is not an issue anymore.

Now my problem is how do I actually deploy the dev to prod...

It seems there is really no way. I am a bit confused..

How do you backup you prod code and database? What if one want's to tweak the design or smth. Is extensions the only way?

clarkwinkelmann

c_costel it's not the only way, but that's the only official one.

Making changes to core directly is highly discouraged. You might have a lot of problems to update to future versions. Of course if you know what you're doing and understand what this means in the future you can go with it ?

Database is another issue. I personally use daily dumps but this will really depends on your specific requirements.

Again, Docker probably has advantages I don't even know. I would love to hear somebody else's opinion on this.

c_costel

Hmm ok I see know. So the right way to use flarum is sort of like wordpress. Where you have a production copy that is independent of the dev copy. Then just use extensions to expand the functionality.

Thank you very much for you help. I was quite confused. This entire week I have been trying to setup a dev environment.

clarkwinkelmann

c_costel having your development setup inside a container is a good thing!

It's maybe just the "push to prod" part that's not designed to work like that at the moment...

c_costel

clarkwinkelmann Yep. This is what I will be doing now:

Use the docker env for development.
Have another docker env for developing my oAuth server with Laravel Passport.
Write some cron jobs that will dump the db and push the entire flarum source + the db on a daily bases to bitbucket (might have some long term issues with storage size)
Make sure the oAuth extension works on my local docker env.
Install the extension on the prod flarum

Do you think this will work? ?

clarkwinkelmann

Why run a job to push your code ? Just commit when you make changes.

Also there's no need to backup Flarum core if you didn't touch it. It will always be available on Packagist/GitHub.

Same goes for your extension. Just commit and push it to a repo each time you change it.

Database is the only thing your users are actually modifying. When you say bitbucket, you mean you will push your db dump in a git repo ? It might be better (and cheaper!) to use something like Amazon S3/Glacier to store these dumps.

c_costel

clarkwinkelmann hmm good point with Amazon S3. I will check it out.

What about all the files uploaded by the users (e.g avatars)? If something breaks that might be lost unless backed up.

clarkwinkelmann always be available on Packagist/GitHub.

True. It's just that I failed to deploy my dev flarum to production and thought it is not doeble through composer or smth.

I guess I still need to learn a bit more about how flarum works under the hood. Would be cool to have a thread how to manage deployments of flarum.

I am actually looking into starting to write the oAuth server extension now and wow this seems to be quite interesting.

Again thanks for getting back to me ?

clarkwinkelmann

c_costel You're right, there's user-generated content in assets and/or storage. In Laravel apps storage is also a persistent storage and should be backed up.

c_costel Would be cool to have a thread how to manage deployments of flarum

Feel free to start it ! Could be useful. (just make sure there's not one already a few months old...)

c_costel

clarkwinkelmann First I need to fix the oAuth and then would be interested push for a discussion. I am planning for a long term use of flarum. Maybe even contribute if I am capable enough :/

tlalok

clarkwinkelmann For my forum I'm using a docker image of flarum in production. But you can't use this images for dev.

The biggest advantage is the speed of production (a few seconds depending on the number of extension you use) and the reliability.
You can consult my Dockerfile here