QUESTION:
In Alfresco, How best to manage and record the process of migrating changes from Dev to prod?
ANSWER:
I thought I would share this knowledge with everyone, so that it will be useful for everyone…
1) Record the (configuration/customization) changes and files changed in DEV and document it separately. When we are ready to do the same in PROD, we will have to do the changes one-by-one.
The changes are going to be in as follows -
2) “<ALF_HOME>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\lib” for any custom action implementation.
3) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
4) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\messages
5) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\web-extension
6) If there are more changes inside the non-custom area, then we will have to remember it as per our documentation we have done while making those changes in DEV. For example, we did changes to C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\share\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\site-data\presets\presets.xml directly, because there is no customization built on it yet in Alfresco.
7) We need to make sure we do the necessary changes in SHARE or ALFRESCO folders, if needed.
It is recommended the changes are done feature by feature. But in worst cases, it is OK to just move bulk changes of all the feature enhancements or configurations at once.
9) Restart the Alfresco server.
10) Alfresco server has to start and run perfectly without any errors.
11) Test every feature one by one.
12) Since it requires a restart of the Alfresco server, it is ideal to perform this operation only in off-times of the server with advanced notice.
Overall, it is *****RECOMMENDED***** that we move every feature’s changes one-by-one from DEV to PROD, after carefully testing in DEV for functional and also regression testing.
Hope this helps! Also please add, if I have missed anything and add any best practices in this note.
Thank you
