Staging site & development best practices

[allana]

What are people doing for staging & development stacks?

I’m on a Canadian ISP that offers Omeka S through Softaculous (a very recent development). I can of course create two sites but Softaculous doesn’t do staging/production management for Omeka the way it does for other installs (e.g. wordpress).

Other than manually exporting the folders and database from one to another, or manually setting up everything on staging to be sure it works and then manually setting it all up again on production, does anyone have any clever tips and tricks for managing this?

Related:
I see this has been asked in the past and so it would be nice to have the user manual updated or some other permanent page somewhere outside the forum:

Best practice question: development to production

I’d say from what I’ve seen not enough places use a separation between development and production. Development server lets to update plugins and themes and test if there are any regressions or quirks with your content before it appears online. It’s not a surprise, though, because of the resources needed to maintain two servers. The only possible overkill is if you ever need to stand up two or more different Omeka sites for different projects. Then, there would be a lot of duplication, since you…

Some similar questions, like how to move sites between hosts, etc., should also be included:

The hosting decision! Can Omeka S be transferred between hosts?

Hi there, I am working on a digital history project at an Australian university and we have decided on Omeka S at the right platform. We are now at the point of deciding where to host, and I wondered how final this decision is - is it technically possible to move an Omeka S project from one host to another, if a couple of years down the track we decide to switch hosting servers? Many thanks! Rachel

Is there a staff member in charge of documentation? I know I can pop some suggestions in a pull request, but I assume there is a team who gets paid to do this work who may want to manage it.

[sharonmleon]

There are, indeed, staff members who work on documentation and the user manual updates. We’ve got a to-do list, to which we’ll add this, but we always welcome suggestions via pull requests.

[LisaH]

Curious about this as well- has anything been added to the manual? we already have a dev server and a prod server. Each has Omeka S installed. Ideally, we would like our users to create their sites on our dev server, then when ready move the site to production. I realize this is a big ask, as their would be many dependencies for each site, but just curious if anyone has a similar workflow?

[triplingual]

The only way I’ve been able to approach this is to pull down JSON information from the Test/Dev environment, pull down the assets/media from the Test/Dev environment, and muddle through pushing it in to the Prod or other environment.

However, I’m interested in giving Tim Sherratt’s recently packaged Python tools a try.

Omeka S Tools | omeka_s_tools

[jflatnes]

In general when I’ve needed a test/prod type setup I’ve done what’s indicated in the original post as an “other than”: the “copy the database and the files” approach. It’s basically the same process as moving a site between two servers or (to an extent) upgrading an install.