What is your work process?

[Mark Gardner <mk...@vt.edu>]

Now that I have a working installation of 2.2.1, I am switching gears to add
IPv6 support. In preparation for that, I would like to know what work
process works best? Do you make modifications on a live (testing) instance?
I suppose the answer will depend on whether the work is on the front-end or
back-end. I believe IPv6 will touch both. Anyway, any advice for developing
on VCL?

Mark

-- 
Mark Gardner
--

Re: What is your work process?

[Josh Thompson <jo...@ncsu.edu>]

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Mark,

I can speak to the frontend side of things.

I generally work on a development setup we have.  For a lot of the work on the 
frontend, you don't even need an active management node checking in to the 
database.  You can set managementnode.lastcheckin to some date far in the 
future and the frontend will happily consider that management node to be 
active.

However, there are times I need to do development against our production 
system for one reason or another.  In that case, I'll either use a separate 
install of the frontend that is pointed at our production database, or I'll 
wrap any changes with an if statement that checks for the logged in user being 
me or the connecting computer being my machine.  If you're using an 
authentication method such as shibboleth that causes apache to provide an 
entry in $_SERVER for the logged in user, checking for the logged in user is 
easy.  If you're just using local or ldap accounts, it'd probably be easier to 
check for the connection coming from your machine, i.e.

if($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == 'x.x.x.x') {
   # put debugging code here
}

I've never tried that method with an IPv6 address.  I'm assuming apache still 
provides REMOTE_ADDR for IPv6 addresses.

Once I have made a set of changes that I want to roll in to our production 
system, I generally create 2 tarballs - the first is a tarball of production 
files that will be updated so that I have a way to quickly revert the changes, 
and the second is of the files I have modified.  Then, I untar the new stuff 
over the old stuff and quickly make sure things load okay.  If not, then I can 
untar the backup tarball to fix it again.

Josh

On Tuesday August 16, 2011, Mark Gardner wrote:
> Now that I have a working installation of 2.2.1, I am switching gears to
> add IPv6 support. In preparation for that, I would like to know what work
> process works best? Do you make modifications on a live (testing)
> instance? I suppose the answer will depend on whether the work is on the
> front-end or back-end. I believe IPv6 will touch both. Anyway, any advice
> for developing on VCL?
> 
> Mark
- -- 
- -------------------------------
Josh Thompson
VCL Developer
North Carolina State University

my GPG/PGP key can be found at pgp.mit.edu
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