Testing to Production

[charlesh]

I'm trying to come up with a good / easy way to go from the testing environment to a production by using php's define. This is pretty simple, I know, but it becomes more complicated when you add SSL and trying to keep URLs explicitly https, so you don't get any nasty warnings. The problem I seem to have is that all the links point to the live server, not the test one. I am planning to define a web root constant for the entire site and will change that once I go live with the changes from the test to the live site. But, before I change all those links, does anyone know a better way to do it?

Hmmm. What would John Marc do?

[admin]

Hmmm. What would John Marc do?

Depends on the day. Last I heard he was on a beach in Hawaii.

[charlesh]

nice... Testing the waters, then.

[Matt]

If you figure it out let us know how ya did it.

[jmarcv]

Ahhhh..... nice waters. Bummer that I had to jump into coming home to snow covered mountain pass closures......

I actually have 5 environments in my big system. I set up vars to choose which subdir I go to, ie:

http://mysite.com/app
http://mysite.com/appTEST
http://mysite.com/appQA

you get the idea.

Once in the env, all links are relative and stay within the env.

If that isnt apparent, point me to examples.

[charlesh]

That's kinda what I was thinking. I was wondering, tho, how you deal with changing the vars. Do you use a php define() to switch between test and production?

Snow! What part of the country do you live in? I heard of some snow in South Dakota.

Charles

[jmarcv]

9,000 feet in Colorado has snow.... ughhhh....

Actually, what "I" do is to test the url:
if (ereg('/myappTEST/',$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])) $TEST=1;
if (ereg('/myapp/',$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])) $PROD=1;
You certainly can use defines, but it sounds like you are looking for something a bit different than what I do. I have links to go to the env and its pretty straightforward after that. I use vars, or could use defines so that I can post code to production but make sure test code does not execute unless we are in the test env.

[charlesh]

Must be nice, actually. What part of CO? We like to go to Summitt (sp) county and ski at Copper and Breckenridge. We usually stay in Frisco.

I like the auto-test code above - yeah, basically I'm going to use defines in a config file and turn test on and off like a switch, but with your method, you can set it up automatically.

Speaking of Error handling, I've been reading a lot on classes and more object oriented approach to PHP, but haven't been able to take it really past a point that I use classes constantly and abstract classes, etc. I'm trying to "classify" some of my old code as I am needing to add some additional features. Error handling hasn't been one of my strong suits, but the try, catch, throw blocks seem a really useful feature. However, everyone has a different way to do error classes.

[jmarcv]

Crested Butte. Matt used to live here before he booked down to Florida.

Classes & Objects.... yeah, I really need to get a grip on those some day.

[charlesh]

Matt,

Are you crazy? Got tired of the snow? High Altitude? Skiing? Low(er) home insurance rates? Florida is nice, too for 1/2 the time.

Here's a great book to check out - explains classes in php and objects in a way that is easy to understand - no $foo->$bar::fooBar();

Amazon.com: PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition: Matt Zandstra: Books

And, John Marc, since you have such a good handle on the base language, using those classes would save you so much time in development. I can see how at this point and am trying to get there, but I still revert to my old ways... It ain't easy.