Support/Comments for Provisioner 1.5-beta

I keep getting
Login to the Remote Site failed - $_SESSION Variable not set
when I try to login to one of my other revo sites. This site is the only one that it won’t connect to and also the only one running the pl version.
Any thoughts?

Hi. In a thread in the ModX 101 forum I raised a thread "Change process for ModX web builders?" asking

Quote from: Byzantium at Jun 20, 2010, 09:08 AM

I am used to working in a simple change process (solo developer) where I have
local webdev directory with what is being worked on
which then gets tried on a
local testing server directory (Apache) for testing
and, if it’s OK gets copied (ftp’d) from the local webdev directory to
the live server
(where of course it promply falls apart...) - but ignoring that last bit:

Clearly if I am enabling the end user to update their content on the live server, albeit in a controlled and restricted way, then I am losing control over that process.

Notably, the only place where a known valid and current copy of the website exists is on the server (assuming it is valid and hasn’t gone wobbly).

Is there any utility for managing this?

I mean something that would enable you to have your local copy of the modxified website, a connection to the remote (live) one, and allow you, for example to:
read a chunk from your local db and write it to the remote one?
or synch local and remote db (and files) based on timestamps

..or am I misunderstanding something about the right way of working with this?

Well provisioner certainly seems to offer most of what I am looking for, but I am a bit confused from reading the documentation on it (UserGuide.odt) - primarily by terminology regarding local and remote sites.

The doc states

The Provisioner component is intended to allow provisioning of a MODx Revolution installation from an existing, remote MODx Revolution or MODx Evolution installation.

and

It should be noted that it does not allow a site to be ’ripped’ of its content, the user has to log into the remote site as a manager user that has at least the level of privilege needed to perform the operations needed, i.e. view elements, users etc. Also it operates as a read only viewer, no content in the remote site is changeable using this component.

Now, to me, my local site is the site on my laptop, and the remote site is the ’live’ site that I want to ’provision’ from it (to use your terminology) - but, according to the above I can’t because the remote site is ’read only’. So - do I think about it the other way round? If I do I can work within the manager on the live site, treating it as local and my laptop (that I am sitting in front of) as remote, but then, within provisioner I have to enter the url for my remote site (my laptop) - and I don’t have it set up for access from the internet (and don’t want to).

Maybe I’m just misreading or misunderstanding the documentation but I would appreciate if someone could enlighten my darkness!

Also - I don’t understand why you would want the remote site to be read only. Assuming that you are validly logged on at both the local site and the remote site and have the appropriate access permissions, surely it would make sense to be able to push or pull from one to the other, and to have indication of which is the most recent, from timestamps, and ideally the ability to synchronise (push & pull) based on those timestamps?

I’m still a relative newbie, and maybe I have misunderstood what provisioner is for, but, like I say, lighten my darkness!

Thanks!

Hi Byzantium,

Provisioner is intended to ’provision’ the site it is installed into, ie the revo site that you have installed the package into, this is called the ’local’ site. You can provision this local site from either another revo site or using the evogateway package another evo site, in either case this is know as the ’remote’ site.

You can only ’pull’(read) from the remote site and install(write) into the local one, this is done deliberately so that you can only affect the site the package is installed in, the local site, you cannot accidentally corrupt a remote site by writing into it. If you want to do this then you must install provisioner in that site also and subsequently pull elements from a remote site.

In your case you must install Provisioner into your live site which becomes your ’local’ site and pull changes from your laptop site, which becomes your ’remote’ site. You need both sites to be web visible to each other as Provisioner uses CURL to wrap up AJAX requests, there’s no real way around this I’m afraid.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, shamblett, for a very clear explanation. Looks like I need to think about making my laptop site web visible.

Hi jerry325, logging into a remote revo 2.0.0 pl site seems to work OK here, the error message you are getting back about the $_SESSION is not from Provisioner, its the error string reported back from your remote site when the login fails, looks like a misconfig on this site somehow but I’d expect a normal manager login to fail also. Anything in the error log(MODx) of the remote site or your local webserver logs.

OK users zi, Jayster, Henrik Nielson and rsgca I’ve condensed your comments in the above thread into separate issues in GitHub, these will now be addressed and tracked individually. Here’s the list http://github.com/shamblett/provisoner/issues

Error message:

Login to the Remote Site failed - Revolution gateway package is not installed in remote Evolution site


Yet we do have the revogateway directory in the assets/snippets directory of the old site

must we do something else?

L

No, if you have the path /assets/snippets/revogateway containing an unzipped version of the revogateway code this is all you need to do, please check that your unzipped copy is not corrupt and that you haven’t accidentally done something like /revogateway/revogateway, your revogateway folder should just contain an index.php file and a folder named ’connectors’.

Also, check your login URL, this should just be the URL of your remote site e.g. ’http://myremotesite.com’ without any other annotation.

Can’t find $site_id

Hi. So now I have my laptop modx site web accessible and I have provisioner installed on the remote site. Both running revo 2.0. Only one problem - when I go to enter the logon details for my laptop site into provisioner on the remote site I discover that my config.inc.php file on the laptop site is nowhere to be found so I can’t get the essential $site_id.

After scouring around for this file without success I decide to just do a re-install and pick up a new one.

Unfortunately, after a fresh clean install I still have no config.inc.php in the /core/config directory.

So two questions:
1. Is there another way I can find the site id?
2. What happened to my config.inc.php?

Reflecting on the latter - I recall that in previous installs (can’t remember if it was evo or revo beta) I had to make certain directories writeable prior to install. I have not done that for this released version because the current documentation does not instruct me to. So is it possible that this is an omission in the install doc and that my config.inc.php is not getting written because it aint writeable and that the install runs through nevertheless?

I have another install of modx 2.0 on this same laptop that does have the config.inc.php file. I did that one about a week ago and may have been following a doc I previously printed off with the instructions about making directories writeable - so is this necessary or not?

I raised this (issue of no config.inc.php) on the modx 2.0 forum so no need to respond here. Not meaning to double post but the act of asking the question above exposed to me where the problem is.