What is the most Effective Database tool / practice for syncing changes between Production / Staging / Local environment
How Do I?
Hi,
The issue we are experiencing is the effective management of the tables/ Channels / fields etc in expression engine between different stages (Production, Development, Local) from the Below path:
Developer -> Utilities -> Database -> Backup utility, are out of sync between the Production, staging and local environments due to not having an effective management tool / practice in place.
What I would like to know is:
If you have multiple developers working on a site, how do you effectively move database changes, through each stage, from local / development and then to production?
Can I export all tables excluding a select few: “for example” I don’t want to have to update the members, settings etc every time we need to do an import, channel data and so on”.
If you would like anymore information, I will do my best to provide it.
Thank you for all responses.
Darrell
Darrell, database migration between environments has always been a sticking point for most, if not all CMS’. Most people use a dev or staging database as their canonical source of truth, and perform a full database dump and import into production to do a deployment. For sites that may have a lot of user generated content this can be a bit of an issue, because the canonical data is essentially production, b/c it is the most up-to-date. If that is the situation you’re in then you probably have to resort to manually creating new channels, fields, etc on production based on what you have in dev/staging.
TJ Draper has an add-on, which I haven’t used, that has migrations of channels, fields etc that may help. https://github.com/tjdraper/executive-ee
I’m also going to toot my own horn here. I’m working on a new add-on that will hopefully solve this problem for most people’s scenarios. I don’t know when it will be released though. https://twitter.com/boldminded/status/1157365313002004480