Recently I've been getting more and more into web development and as such have a few questions. I have a few websites that are on a production LAMP server and I've been trying to copy them to my local computer running xampp 1.7.1 on XP Pro. The problem I've been having is mostly path issues. I mainly develop for wordpress, joomla, magento, mediawiki. When I copy the site locally I end up having to change config files and/ or database fields to reflect the local path. The problem I always have is anytime I upload files that contain local paths back up to the server I have to change the paths back to the production paths or I get 'object not found' errors. Remembering the correct paths for each install and what files need to have path updates is a real pain. Is there something I'm missing? Is there an easier way to make sure the paths are correct whether I'm on production or development without having to manually change them every time I upload or download the file or database?
Ideally, you should have a line of code in your main config file which is able to determine what server the code is running on. I use something like the following:
if(__FILE__ === '/home/peter/web_projects/my-project/config.php') {
// set up configuration for development environment
define('DEV', true);
[etc]
}
else {
// code is running on the live server
define('DEV', false);
[etc]
}
This allows me to have the same config.php on my development machine as well as live, and any other files can just check the DEV constant to know if they are local or live.
Yes, what you're missing is an automated deployment system. For linux, there is capistrano, and other such ones, that you may look at (note: I've written one for Windows, but it's not useful for you).
Related
I've got a wordpress site that I have been using for a year now and it is hosted with HostGator. I have got a few tests i would like to run on the site, but I would like to test it offline using wamp first before making it LIVE.
The problem is previously I was always making changes to the LIVE site, usually at hours when I get little to no traffic. However, that has changed now and I do get traffic most hours through out a 24hr day.
So my problem is:
How do i download my existing website to laptop (wamp) and make those changes with new theme? (total newbie, sorry!)
I use Windows 7, so not sure what I need to be doing to get the site working like a live site offline.
Once I have implemented the new changes, what is the best way to upload the updated site back to the HostGator server without having any downtime or errors for site visitors?
Is there anything else I need to install or do inorder for this to work? I hope you can give me as much information as possible or any links to any guides or articles that explain how to do this.
Thanks so much for any help you can offer!!!
If you're using Hostgator, the process is simple:
Install XAMPP or WAMPP on your computer;
Go to your cPanel, backup and download your website;
Extract the backup to your computer, specially the homedir and the sql;
Go to your local environment, access http://localhost/phpmyadmin
Create a new database, doesn't matter the name but for the example let's call it "database";
Inside that database, import the one taken from the backup;
create a new folder inside your htdocs with the name of your website, "example.com";
Extract the content of the homedir there;
edit wp-config with the following data:
Host: 'localhost'
Username: 'root'
Password: blank
access http://localhost/example.com
You can check a good tutorial about the subject here.
About putting the site live, I recommend you to use a GIT repository, however it's understandable that might be a little complicated and perhaps too much work for what you're trying to achieve.
Try to move your files directly from your local to live environment using Filezilla or WinSCP, the drag and drop should replace the files live and the downtime should be minimal.
Instead of WAMP, you can always use VirtualBox to install CentOS or Ubuntu/Debian.
You can go one further and install either CentminMod to automate creating a LAMP, or a full panel like ISPConfig or Virtualmin.
That take care of create the environment.
Create a new account on the LAMP, using the same domain name.
You can FTP with Windows to get the files, but networking Windows and Linux is a pain. The better option is to use the command line (CLI) in the Linux VM to ftp the files from Hostgator to the VM. This guide will help with that process: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/FTP-3.html
Then your only concern is the MySQL database. And for this, you have several options.
For me, the easiest is to buy (or try!) SQLyog on Windows, and then copy the database from the Hostgator source to the localhost destination. Some mild networking is needed for Windows to see the Linux VM, but nothing as complex as file sharing (the FTP issue). SQLyog is far quicker than backing up the database, then restoring it -- especially since you can run into memory issues doing it this way. It fully depends on the size of the database.
The cheap/free backup>restore method is to use phpMyAdmin.
WordPress also has plugins, of varying cost, but you still have the possible backup>restore memory issue there as well.
When done, just copy it the other way, again using SQLyog and CLI ftp. You'll still have some downtime, but it will hopefully be minimal.
As a newbie, this probably seems like rocket science, but at least it gives you a good place to start. Welcome to the world of locally dev'ing sites!
Hi guys I've dumped (made a backup) of my Appengine datastore entities,following this tutorial, now I wonder if there is a way to restore the data locally ? so I can do some test and debug.
In windows, the datastore is in the directory
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp\AppName
In OSx this question can help you
In this directory are storade the datastore.db (the local storage), change the name (the app should not be running, and if is locked, kill all the python process)
Now go to the appengine dashboard
click in your app link
click in Blob Viewer (i'm assumming that you did the backup into a blobstore)
click in the file name
click in download
rename the file to datastore.db
copy to the previous path
start the app
Remote API (as koma mentions) is the main GAE-documented approach, and it's a good approach. Alternatively, you can download the entities using the cloud download tool, write your own store reader/deserializer, and execute it within your dev server local instance: http://gbayer.com/big-data/app-engine-datastore-how-to-efficiently-export-your-data. Read the part about the New Approach...
While these options are not automatic and require engineering, I really wanted to point out the side effect of doing this: We have been facing performance issues in the local development server for months now, specifically when the datastore has more than 1,000 entities with over 50 indexes. Just search for "require_indexes slow" and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm sure you have a solid reason to import lots of data locally for testing and debugging, just wanted to let you know your application will perform extremely slow, and debug mode will be impossibly slow; we can't even use debug mode with our setup anymore.
If you want to get some test data in your local db, you could copy some using the remote api
I have just started using GAE (Python 2.7 SDK 1.6.4) , I have set up a
simple test project using Pydev (latest version) in eclipse (indigo)
on Windows XP (SP3).
It all works fine, my app can record data in the datastore and the blobstore
and then retrieve it, but when I stop the development server and start
it again the data in the datastore is lost. This is not the case for
the blobstore which is retaining blobs fine and I can see the
blobstore folder that gets created in C:\Temp
I did the sensible thing and look back through old posts and found
that most people who have this problem solve it by changing the
location of the datastore file, so I used the following parameters;
--datastore_path="${workspace_loc}/myproject/datastore"
--blobstore_path="${workspace_loc}/myproject/blobstore"
"${workspace_loc}/myproject/src"
I moved the blobstore at the same time as you can see.
The blobstore still works, and now the blobstore folder is created in
myproject folder as expected. The datastore file is still not created
however, and when I stop and restart the development server the data
is still lost.
The dev server startup logs include the following entry
WARNING 2012-04-20 10:49:04,513 datastore_file_stub.py:513] Could not
read datastore data from C:\myworkspace\myproject\datastore
So I know it is trying to create the datastore in the correct place.
Finally I lifted the whole eclipse workspace folder and copied it to
another computer with exactly the same setup except it is running
Windows 7 instead of Windows XP.
Everything works fine there - both the datastore file and blobstore
folder are now created where I expect them to be.
I have set up eclipse, python, gae, my project and my eclipse launch
file in exactly the same way on two computers, it works on one and
not the other. Maybe XP is something to do with it but to be honest I
think that's unlikely.
The only other clue I have come up with is that a recent change to the
GAE development server stopped writing to the datastore file after
every change and only flushes on exit, this problem may be closely related to mine;
App Engine local datastore content does not persist
However adding the following to my code did not help at all.
from google.appengine.tools import dev_appserver
import atexit
atexit.register(dev_appserver.TearDownStubs)
So it's not down to incorrect termination sequence either as far as I
can tell although it may be that I was just added it in the wrong place (I'm am new to python).
Anyway I am stumped and I would be really grateful for suggestions you
guys can come up with.
It's probably http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7244 and a bug. Hopefully a fix will be available soon.
did you try:
--storage_path=...
Path at which all local files (such as the Datastore, Blobstore files, Google Cloud Storage Files, logs, etc) will be stored, unless overridden by --datastore_path, --blobstore_path, --logs_path, etc.
found at https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/devserver?csw=1
I do my web development and testing on my laptop running an installation of xampp - I upload things to my host, but I always go through cpanel's file manager to do it. I realize that there's definitely a better way to go about it, but I need to be pointed in the right direction to do so, also other tips on how to manage stuff would be appreciated.
FTP - can I keep my site's stuff synched to a local directory on htdocs so I can keep my site backed up on my computer yet update the site with whatever changes I make locally? Can anyone recommend a good client (preferably free) that I can use to do this?
Database stuff - how do I backup / sync databases in the same way? Ideally I'd like to do the same thing as with my files. Merge / upload whatever I've developed with a click or two. Is this possible? Is this wise?
Any help and advice would be appreciated. :)
I do my development in Eclipse which allows me to combine development and sync via FTP in one environment. It will also tell you if a file changed on the server and allow you to decide whether to override it or not. You can also disable the syncing of certain types of files with pattern matching and use other technologies like WebDAV or SSH to sync (if supported by your host of course).
I'm configuring an installer for our product which, up until now, was distributed as a war file, usually on tomcat. Once tomcat has exploded the directory, the user has to open a properties file and set their database connection information. I'd like the installer to do this (we're using install4j) but there doesn't seem to be a built-in way to modify a text file inside a war file. I could just have the installer deploy the app as an exploded directory, which would save me the trouble here, but what do I lose by deploying like that instead of deploying the war?
It might work better to set up the database connection as a JNDI Datasource, rather than hand-editing a properties file inside the webapp/ directory. This is especially important if you want to allow users to re-deploy the application from the .WAR archive without overwriting their local configuration changes.
Of course, the JNDI setup isn't going to be trivially accomplished through the installer, either, since the mechanism used varies from app server to app server. However, any competent Java application server administrator should know how to configure a named datasource. Furthermore, by delegating responsibility to the app server, you allow your users to take advantage of connection pooling, clustering, and any other features provided by the datasource implementation bundled with their application server of choice.
Not much I would think - perhaps a bit of disk space, but if that's not a problem you'd be fine. Have you thought of having the installer generate the properties file and using a ZIP library (.WAR is really a .ZIP - rename it to a .ZIP and see what you get :) ) to replace or add it in?