Symphony.

While searching the Forums I could not find if this is already discussed, but I’d like to be able to install Symphony (temporarily) in a subdomain.

The reason is that I’d like to have a sort of ‘staging’ site, next to the ‘live’ site.

I understand Symphony is ‘blissfully unaware’ of the domain it is installed, correct? If the domain is not stored anywhere, I would be able to move the site from a subdomain to the main site’s folder when testing is done, right?

Would I simply put the Symphony files in this subdomain’s folders and run the installer? Obviouly I do not want to touch the current ‘live’ site so it needs to be ‘safe’…

I see no reason that this won’t work. I sure hope it will because I’m about to install Symphony in a sub-domain of another Symphony site.

Good to hear @wisolman

Please let me know if you ran into any issues ;)

I currently have this working on my site, in a password protected subdomain (for additional security).

Works without a problem.

You will need lots of tests to check out how to actually deploy your changes to the live site. In this respect Symphony 2 is far away from simple (well, and at the same time much simpler than other CMSs).

I have set up “dev”, “stage” and “live” versions of websites before. But I have to admit: In many cases I still work on the live sites. Symphony makes it so easy to deliver custom content for logged-in developers or authors…

We should persuade Nick to write a blog post about his development cycle, using the database synchroniser extension.

It’s how I will be doing it when I move from dev to live, although I haven’t tested it yet.

@michael-e Why do you think I need lots of tests?

Ideally, I would keep all development files in Version Control (which I have at the moment) and deployment would mean checking out on the server. This would make it easy to roll back if need be.

However, many of my (client’s) sites are on shared hosting that do not allow for SSH access and/or version control. This forces me to use oldskool FTP to update the various environments.

The reason for this question is that, at the moment, I am working on a site that will soon go ‘live’. I’d like to have the new development site on the ‘live’ server so that the client can already edit content and ‘test drive’ the new site etc.

When the site is ready to go live I would like to simply ‘move’ the development site’s files/folders (mainly Symphony stuff) to the main domain (instead of the subdomain). The database (settings) would remain unchanged.

Why would this ‘need lots of tests’ if Symphony is ‘domain agnostic’?

However, many of my (client’s) sites are on shared hosting that do not allow for SSH access and/or version control. This forces me to use oldskool FTP to update the various environments.

What do you use for SVN hosting? If you use something like Beanstalk then you can deploy via FTP.

We should persuade Nick to write a blog post about his development cycle, using the database synchroniser extension.

Yes, have been meaning to! One day…

What do you use for SVN hosting? If you use something like Beanstalk then you can deploy via FTP.

I host my own Subversion server at Webfaction. What exactly do you mean with ‘deploy via FTP’? How would that be different than uploading from my local repository to a server via FTP?

It means you can just click a button and it’ll deploy a specific SVN revision to the server via FTP saving you the job yourself. We found it’s more reliable than manually uploading files (you don’t miss any, and it discourages developers to sneak in changes to the files directly on the server).

But there’s a million ways to deploy a site from source control, and everyone has their preference :-)

True, and good points. I am, however, Dutch and not prepared to start paying money for a Beanstalk account when I have the possibility to host subversion myself ;-)

That said: Beanstalk looks great. I love the fact that it allows both SVN and GIT repo’s.

Anyway (back to topic): it seems there’s no problem installing Symphony in a subdomain and simply moving the files ‘up’ to the main domain at some point(?)

No problem at all, works fine. You may need to dump the db and load it into the live one… The problem will come when you have a live site and need to add new sections etc, hence Nicks extension.

Other developers workflows are of interest to me, just starting out officially…

@michael-e Why do you think I need lots of tests?

I was not referring to the initial “copy to the live server” process, which is pretty straightforward. I was talking about having a live site (with user data input, maybe) and a development version. Like deignermonkey says:

The problem will come when you have a live site and need to add new sections etc, hence Nicks extension.

While Nick’s extension is working well, the process of synchronizing is still a dangerous undertaking. And I myself needed “a lot of tests” to get this working…

…the process of synchronizing is still a dangerous undertakinga dangerous undertaking…

Thanks Michael: very true. I have not tried Nicks Database Synchroniser extension but trust it helps out a lot. Still I agree: there be dragons…

I’d be interested to hear how other people handle development and deployment, but that’s something for another thread ;-)

I’m going to start a new thread about it as it’s a keen interest of mine to know how people do things, see if I’m doing things the long way round…

@davidhund - I now have two separate Symphony powered sites running in a domain and sub-domain without any problems — so far. I’m on BlueHost.