[development] Active databases and development/test/production environment (was: ASP integration with Drupal?)

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

J-P

If you want developers to share code with the live site, then that
should work.

The database is not the only component here. There are modules
and themes too.

It is not a good idea to have developers share code that is actively
in development with a live site. You want to give them write access
to the sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes (and/or whereever else
they have code they need to muck around with).

This is not a good practice in general.

Now, if you are talking testing/staging and live, where no code
changes are done, then you have a point.

On 8/16/07, J-P Stacey <jp.stacey at torchbox.com> wrote:
>
> Tao Starbow wrote:
> > This is one of the cooler, not-so-well known drupal features.  In
> > settings.php you can define $db_url as an array
> > $db_url['default'] = normal drupal string
> > $db_url['backoffice'] = other mysql connect string
> >
> > then you use db_set_active( db_key ) to switch between them as needed.
>
> Is this a standard core feature, enabled by default? I feel like saying
> "why
> wasn't I told about this before?" :)
>
> One of the big problems we have is that many developers working on a given
> codebase: this means the codebase is in subversion and people check it out
> to their own machines, work on it, check changes back in.
>
> Some developers develop on the same machine, because their desktops are
> WinXX and setting up LAMP stacks takes time. On this machine, whilst they
> can check out site-specific codebases to e.g.
> sites/developername-clientname-devel.example.com and hence develop in
> their
> own sandboxes, it's difficult to keep the site under revision and yet not
> have people be forced to share a database by settings.php .
>
> But with the above a high-priority module could switch quickly and cleanly
> between developers' own sandboxed databases: does that sound right? How
> would you sneak in before any of the other modules? Would the following at
> the end of settings.php be sufficient:
>
>         db_set_active($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']); // defaults to 'default'
>
> Or is that too hacky? Can you even call a function from within
> settings.php
> (notwithstanding the argument of "would you want to?")
>
> Somewhere among all this is functionality to make Drupal a good deal more
> "enterprise", for whatever that hackneyed term is worth. Transparently
> distributed development for large-scale, independent CMS teams on their
> clients' behalf.
>
> Cheers,
> J-P
> --
> J-P Stacey
> +44 (0)1608 811870
> http://torchbox.com
>



-- 
2bits.com
http://2bits.com
Drupal development, customization and consulting.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20070816/2db6f8d2/attachment.htm