Setting up a debug/production environment once live?
Hello Folks:
I am well into the process of switching away from eSellerate to zencart (and a merchant gateway account.) Thank you to all the Zencart folks for their work and efforts to date (and, I've provided Zencart as the reference for the setup of my merchant account with Beanstream.)
I have a questions others must have run into...
So far, since my new store is not live, I've been able to develop and test it freely, using test merchant accounts and the appropriate settings in the payment modules. But once I go live, I would live to be able to sandbox any further changes, test them, them push them to the live environment. Although this applies to test purchases in particular, it also applies to any changes to the store I may want to do down the road.
Has anyone come up with a nice generic solution to this that I am missing? The most important thing I would want to 'sandbox' would be test purchases with my test account at Beanstream when I add a new product. Of course, in a live environment, if I temporarily switch the payment module to test mode, then actual purchases will fail (or worse... go through without an actual payment!)
Apologies in advance if this has been covered somewhere. I've not found it yet in the Zencart e-book and searching this forum.
Thanks,
Dan Pronovost
Re: Setting up a debug/production environment once live?
What is the concern with a new product?
The option you have is to create a second install with it's own database
Do this in a directory that you password protect to prevent the SE's from indexing it
Then maintain a fieset backup and a DB backup of last known good state
make changes/adds and if you stuff something up tou ca revert to your backups
Re: Setting up a debug/production environment once live?
Yes, a second installation of Zencart, where you test all changes, then have to manually copy over (from one DB to the other) or re-implement the new products is an option.
But... I was hoping there was something easier than that, or a plug-in that would manage the copy process from the development store setup to the live store setup (which would copy modified templates files and the like, DB changes, but not the debug payment module settings, etc.) A simple enough thing for me to setup I suppose.
I just wanted to know what others did. Thank you for the suggestion.
Re: Setting up a debug/production environment once live?
Quote:
I just wanted to know what others did.
Using the template override system
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=36
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=346
I keep a local copy of the cart files including the template overrides folders & files
And a tree structured set of just the override ones
Make all changes to these local files and as almost all are in the /includes folder you can just FTP the tree structured override files up to your server
You might want to keep a test set
That takes care of the file changes...
DB changes must be done manually