Umbraco Bi-directional Deployment

Question

I'm using Umbraco 7.4.x. I've been trying to figure out the best way to do bi-directional deployments.

As in, we have more than one dev working locally, and we have a dev server and a live server. We have single click deploys from local to dev, but that's only code. We were copying up the databases to dev, but now we also have people who need to enter content on dev. This leads us to making changes on dev database as well and copying down the database. We do all this with Version control of course, but still, this is all very inconvenient.

Is there a better approach to this that I'm missing? I tried using usync a few months ago but we'd often run into crashes.

I have heard of Courier, it seems like it would be good for deploying from dev/stage to production, but would that also work for pushing content/doc type changes to our local machines? I wasn't sure as they're not web servers on the internet but just local IIS Express running through Visual Studios

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

We use uSync (uSync + uSync.ContentEdition - https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/usync/) for moving everything between instances. Give it another shot as it has changed from the point when you're exploring it in the past. It's worth to mention that it requires good configuration on different enviroments to avoid conflicts etc.

You can also use Courier and it's latest version is used by Umbraco Cloud (http://umbraco.io/) which may also interest you as it gives you full control over deployment processes between multiple Umbraco instances.

Answer 2

One option is to have all of your developers set up to work off of the same dev database. On occasion, your developers might have to "Republish the entire site" or reindex the examine indexes to make sure all their cache and TEMP file are up to date. Otherwise, this has worked well for us for many years. One frustrating part of this is that media files uploaded by dev A won't be immediately on the file system for dev B. You should be able to move your media to azure blob storage to work around this problem. There is a package that should help set this up here.

I wouldn't recommend uSync.ContentEdition. I haven't tried it personally, but I have yet to hear a good report about it. uSync on the other hand has been a life saver for us even if it isn't perfect. At this point, we install usync on every site even if we never configure it to read in changes. We like that we can record our changes to document types and datatypes in source control. Working with the shared database setup means that we don't need usync to be reading on our dev and local environments. However, you will need to make sure that your devs all understand usync. If dev A adds a doc type, the usync .def file for that doc type could show up on the file system for dev B. Dev B should not commit that usync file in that situation.

Courier has been working a lot better recently. I wouldn't recommend it unless you are running umbraco 7 and can get the latest version of Courier. Courier is very useful, but you should do a lot of testing with it before you hand it over to a client because Courier gives you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in a big way. It has definitely improved. In Courier for umbraco 6 I used to have to try really hard to deploy without breaking my site. Now, in Courier for umbraco7, I have to try really hard to break it. This is now a viable option for deploying content changes to production. Just make sure you test it heavily before you use it in a production environment.