Answered Advice/Best-Practice/How-To migrate local dev to live site

hi all,

so, once i got the basics up'n'running, our user-base took off quickly. since then it's been a matter of fixes & tweaks done right in the Manager on the live site.

well, now the work i'm doing is getting more complex & i'm afraid of screwing something up, so i downloaded the entire thing & have it running in MAMP on my local computer.

i've done some pretty major changes & now i'm not sure how to move those changes from local to live server without messing something up.

i've done changes to resources, chunks, templates, & even upgrades. i've also made content changes! yikes! how do i move all of that over without overwriting any user-specific stuff?

yeah, i realize i shoulda thought of this before doing all that. just too much going on to think of EVERYTHING ;-)

in case it matters, i'm the only person using "the manager" - all our users are Front-End only.

REF: using ModX Revo 2.4.3

Quote from: BobRay at May 20, 2016, 05:25 PM

There are various shortcuts, but TBH, I usually cut-and-paste the content into the remote site because it's the safest way to go.

With upgrades, you can just perform the same upgrades at the remote site (I'd do that first).

thanks Bob,

i just thought too, maybe best to do one of those "scheduled site offline for maintenance" things i've seen before(?). since i've got some restructuring to do too. rather than being doing resource additions/deletions/name-changes & such whilst people may be using it.

thanks.

I should mention that another way to go is to make all the chunks, snippets, plugins, templates, etc. static so their content is in files. Then you can either FTP them individually, or if you have a good editor, "publish" or "deploy" them from within the editor. That won't help you if you're changing TV settings, property values, or System Settings, though.

Some people have also used MyComponent to make a package out of the objects. It will handle almost anything you might do except permissions and Media Sources. Then it's just a matter of exporting the changes, running build, copying the transport file to core/packages at the remote site, and installing it. I use this method often with client projects. It can take a while to get the package config file right and learn MyComponent. I'm familiar enough with MC that I can do a package in less than 20 minutes, but for someone else it might not be worth the effort unless there will be a fair amount of ongoing work on the project.

Another way is to use Vapor to package the entire site, though it's overkill if you're just changing a few objects and Vapor doesn't always work.

Totally not helpful for your immediate situation, but just had to put in a quick plug for MODX Cloud, which does this sort of thing so effortlessly you might think it's a magic wand. Seriously, development clouds, snapshots, auto backups, it's as close to perfect as you cat get for staging MODX development.

thanks again ya'll, for all the feedback. i'm just gonna go the low-tek & safer way Bob mentioned... copy/paste

You could also use Gitify to set it up on top of a git repository. Gitify writes your data (resources, elements and any other type of object you'd like it to write) to text files that you can commit to a repository. Push that to your live server, and use Gitify again to write it to the MODX site. See https://github.com/modmore/Gitify/ and https://github.com/modmore/Gitify/wiki