Is there anywhere I can get any details about the technical setup required fro courier to work. We work in a corporate environment and i need to make sure that our end is set up correctly for courier to work before investing in a Pro license to find that it is not.
I think I pretty much answered this question in your previous forum post, but here's another bash at it.
Ideally you want to have externally accessible sub-domains for your dev / stage / live sites, they can of course be secured using a firewall to only allow HTTP traffic from each other.
Alternatively you can use the yourdomain.com.local name and your host files for your internal development site and this will still be able to push data to your live server, but not receive data.
Thanks, so if we have a 3 tier environment that we wish to setup;
1. Development - invisible to external parties, each umbraco site has own db on the server (SQL Server express) dev.yourdomain.com
2. Staging - visible to external parties with sufficient rights, Each umbraco site has its own db on the server (SQL Server express) preview.yourdomain.com
3. Live - visible to all external parties, each umbraco site has own db on separate SQL server (SQL Server) www.yourdomain.com
We wish to use Courier to migrate dev changes to staging so they can be signed off and subsequently be migrated to live. Currently we are double handling, once in dev and once in live. Need to get rid of this as our workload increases.
My understanding is that courier can work like this. Each tier can communicate with the one above it. I also assume courier needs to be able to FTP files across as well as db settings.
Is what I am describing possible and is it the best way to set up?
Courier uses webservices (SOAP) to communicate between installs (that also includes transfering files). So the only thing it needs is an open port 80 between the servers.
Be aware that Courier - currently - only transfers content and media. Not other types of Umbraco objects such as document types, macros and templates. However, it'll warn you about any inconsistencies in those objects between servers and tell you what should be updated (ie. it'll automatically prevent you from syncing content/media to environments with different schemas).
My experience is that it is far easier to have all developers connect their umbraco site running locally to the same shared database running on an accessible server.
If you have 2 or 3 developers working on the same umbraco site, they may each have a version of the site running on their workstation. When connecting the same database, changes done to umbraco (datatypes, macros etc) will immediately be in effect for all developers. This saves a lot of time migrating changes to umbraco from different developers.
As long as you keep all code under source control, all developers can always get a latest version of the code. I can highly recommend setting up your development environment so that everything that is not included in the umbraco zip you download are placed under source control in Visual Studio.
technical setup
Is there anywhere I can get any details about the technical setup required fro courier to work. We work in a corporate environment and i need to make sure that our end is set up correctly for courier to work before investing in a Pro license to find that it is not.
Hi Chris,
I think I pretty much answered this question in your previous forum post, but here's another bash at it.
Ideally you want to have externally accessible sub-domains for your dev / stage / live sites, they can of course be secured using a firewall to only allow HTTP traffic from each other.
Alternatively you can use the yourdomain.com.local name and your host files for your internal development site and this will still be able to push data to your live server, but not receive data.
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks, so if we have a 3 tier environment that we wish to setup;
1. Development - invisible to external parties, each umbraco site has own db on the server (SQL Server express) dev.yourdomain.com
2. Staging - visible to external parties with sufficient rights, Each umbraco site has its own db on the server (SQL Server express) preview.yourdomain.com
3. Live - visible to all external parties, each umbraco site has own db on separate SQL server (SQL Server) www.yourdomain.com
We wish to use Courier to migrate dev changes to staging so they can be signed off and subsequently be migrated to live. Currently we are double handling, once in dev and once in live. Need to get rid of this as our workload increases.
My understanding is that courier can work like this. Each tier can communicate with the one above it. I also assume courier needs to be able to FTP files across as well as db settings.
Is what I am describing possible and is it the best way to set up?
Courier uses webservices (SOAP) to communicate between installs (that also includes transfering files). So the only thing it needs is an open port 80 between the servers.
Be aware that Courier - currently - only transfers content and media. Not other types of Umbraco objects such as document types, macros and templates. However, it'll warn you about any inconsistencies in those objects between servers and tell you what should be updated (ie. it'll automatically prevent you from syncing content/media to environments with different schemas).
Hope this helps!
Niels...
My experience is that it is far easier to have all developers connect their umbraco site running locally to the same shared database running on an accessible server.
If you have 2 or 3 developers working on the same umbraco site, they may each have a version of the site running on their workstation. When connecting the same database, changes done to umbraco (datatypes, macros etc) will immediately be in effect for all developers. This saves a lot of time migrating changes to umbraco from different developers.
As long as you keep all code under source control, all developers can always get a latest version of the code. I can highly recommend setting up your development environment so that everything that is not included in the umbraco zip you download are placed under source control in Visual Studio.
Kind regards
Dennis Milandt
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