Should we build it? An easy MODX-Installations Management Tool?

Hello everyone

We are a web agency https://www.cloudtec.ch and build websites using MODX. As most of the users we are huge fans of MODX. But if you are managing a lot of installations things get messy and time consuming. You have to keep up with security updates, have to create reliable backups, must be able to revert false installations and so on. If you don’t have automated processes it takes a lot of time.

I know you have all been there. I think even the MODX team has been there, because they built MODX Cloud. So why aren’t we just switching over to MODX-Cloud?

The main reason: Flexibility. Secondary reason: We are a Swiss company and our clients want their data hosted in Switzerland. Not much to do about that.

Some of our clients have their own hosting accounts others are using our hosting service etc… We of course try to make everything as simple as possible but don’t always achieve it.

To the point:
We are currently building our own MODX Installation Management Tool. We take advantage of the powerful Command-Line-Interface (CLI) to automate processes to launch and update and backup modx websites.

Main functionality:
- Manage all modx installations in one backend
- Connect to multiple webserver (ssh always required)
- One Click updates and backups of the installations
- New installations from scratch, with predefined settings for modx
- Automated backup jobs, different backup strategies
- Connect to external storage provides such as dropbox, s3, gdrive etc...
- And more

The tool will not be as powerful as modx cloud but it gets the job done and makes our life’s easier. And we are not “locked-in” on modx cloud. There are similar solutions on the market but none for modx. Unless you know of one?

We are building this tool for us, but eventually also thinking of making it available as a service.

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Let me know what you think!

Thank you
Chris

There are some solutions out there using the CLI interface. The best one (in my opinion) are the shell scripts from Jeroen Kenters:
https://gist.github.com/jkenters/1760731 + https://gist.github.com/jkenters/1767832

But a managing tool (maybe as CMP inside of a MODX installation) would be better.

For the small sites I tend to work with, I install the Updater dashboard widget, and use the install.php script to update. It's pretty quick. I use Vapor or Teleport to make backup packages so it's easy enough to revert if necessary.

BTW: You should blog & tweet that, because the forums are a bit neglected these days. [ed. note: Jako last edited this post 11 years, 4 months ago.]

Yeah, the Slack channels are taking up an amazing amount of time and energy. Not so much left for the forums.

Yeah, for sure it will be a great tool.
Go for it!

Quote from: Jako at Jun 11, 2015, 05:11 AM

But a managing tool (maybe as CMP inside of a MODX installation) would be better.

We have seen the available CLI scripts and our solution builds on some ideas of them. We first did a proof of concept where we put together mainly scripts to see if we can acheive what we want. Also we had to make sure that we use a php based SSH Library that works with multiple web hosting solutions. We had difficulties with timeouts etc. Therefore I think for most standard hosting environments our scripts and solution would not work. We must run it on a self managed ubuntu server, where we have full control over the processes. Because we have a task runner in place that executes the jobs in the background. So I don’t think that a MODX CMP could do it all.

Quote from: Jako at Jun 11, 2015, 05:11 AM

You should blog & tweet that

Good idea. I created a blog post on our website. Even with an ultra early mock-up

https://www.cloudtec.ch/blog/web/2015/easy-modx-installation-management-tool [ed. note: cloudtec last edited this post 11 years, 4 months ago.]

Quote from: sottwell at Jun 11, 2015, 05:26 AM

I use Vapor or Teleport to make backup packages so it's easy enough to revert if necessary.

Thanks for pointing these solutions out to me. Maybe we even could use some of it for our manager. We want to build a GUI, where everything is inplace and easy to use.

Quote from: Jako at Jun 11, 2015, 05:28 AM

the forums are a bit neglected these days.

Jako, so far we got quite some positive feedback. Which alternative "channel" could we use to address a few more MODX users? If not the forums - where else?
Thank you

A lot is happening on https://modxcommunity.slack.com at the moment. Get an invitation on http://modx.org/