[development] site provisioning/multisite management/database migration tools

[Dave Cohen]

Here are two approaches that migrate changes from dev to live (and to other 
developers' instances).  They both involve some low-level database stuff, 
which may make them not suitable for the average Drupal user.  I'm no expert 
in the projects you listed, but I think these two address some things the 
others do not.

http://drupal.org/node/181128
http://www.dave-cohen.com/node/1779

There was some discussion about this sort of thing at DrupalCon Boston.  No 
clear best practices came from that BOF: 
http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/updating-and-upgrading-live-sites
http://www.mikiane.com/node/2008/03/04/live-blogging-drupalcon-boston-2008

-Dave


On Monday 24 March 2008, Angela Byron wrote:
> At Drupalcon, there was all kind of talk around challenges like how to
> manage a collection of multisite installs, how to do things like run
> cron or update.php on 60 gazillion sites, how to enable/disable
> "packages" of modules/functionality to avoid having to click through
> 10,000 things, how to migrate database changes from one site to another,
> etc.
>
> I'm planning on spending a few hours this week trying out various Drupal
> packaging/site provisioning systems and writing up a report
> comparing/contrasting them.
>
> Here are the modules I know about in this space:
>
> http://drupal.org/project/patterns: Module/system configurations that
> can be run at any time
>
> http://drupal.org/project/hostmaster: Bryght's multisite hosting managed
> site deployment framework, which includes
> http://drupal.org/project/hosting and http://drupal.org/project/provision
>
> http://drupal.org/project/autopilot: Migrate changes from dev to live
>
> http://drupal.org/project/deploy: Migrate changes from dev to live
>
> http://drupal.org/project/drush: Command-line tool containing a bunch of
> useful commands such as running cron, downloading modules, etc.
>
> Any others I should be taking a look at?
>
> -Angie