topic Deployment receiver just DELETED my entire web site and more in Alfresco Archive

Deployment receiver just DELETED my entire web site and more

ftoth — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:15:11 GMT

I have no idea why or how, but I just set up the deployment receiveron an existing web site (a staging site, thankfully), and then attemptedto deploy a single folder with a couple of new files.The deployment receiver deleted EVERYTHING in my root and thendeployed the new files.I have this set up on

Re: Deployment receiver just DELETED my entire web site and more

ftoth — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:51:59 GMT

I am having a hard time believing that this just happened!

Who writes code that can happily go and delete dozens of folders
and thousands of files and not a single mention in the documentation
of this possibility?

Cleverly, because the deployment receiver wants a destination folder
that's one level up from ROOT, it got not only my web site (everything
under ROOT), but also everything that was one level up. This happened
to be a user directory, so it pretty much cleaned everything out!

I'm trying to figure out why this did NOT happen in my development
environment. I'm using exactly the same version, environment, etc.
The only difference is the path difference between the dev box and the
staging box.

The only thing I can think of that was different: On my dev box, I
first tested deployment with the deployment receiver pointed at a test
directory (thankfully). Is it possible that it established its "snapshot"
(what's there and what's not) during that initial testing? Then, later, when
I pointed it to the actual site, it never attempted to sync everything.

Readers, please understand. We have a large, complex site, and we're
using alfresco to manage just a small portion of it (at this point). And
somehow, the deployment receiver decided to DELETE everything in
the web root and the folder above it that it did not know about. Since
it was deploying only 2 files in 2 folders, it DELETED thousands of other
files.

I very much need to know how and why and how to prevent this in
the future.

Fred

Re: Deployment receiver just DELETED my entire web site and more

kvc — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 04:26:44 GMT

I posted a response to your second post, which you can read here:

http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=10073

Please do remember that although our Engineers check forums regularly, we can't guarantee that they will answer any one question in any given timeframe. Our engineers primarily focus on feature development and support-driven bug fixes, although each one allocates a good percentage of time to keep abreast what is happening in the Community and to assist via the forums.

Alfresco offers an Enterprise subscription so that if you are dependent on Alfresco for a business-critical site, you have a number to call to get a person in our Support team to assist you. That comes with an SLA; there is none on the forums. In this case, the deployment behavior was not a bug; it's actually doing what it thinks it should be doing (though in your scenario you can benefit from our upcoming 2.2 deployment excludes config support).

If this were a bug, our Support engineers escalate needed fixes and track them through to closure via maintenance release. If you do need guaranteed response times and ability escalate the need for patch fixes, then really that what our Enterprise subscription is about.

This post is not intended to "sell" you on Alfresco. I love a vibrant Community and those that need a subscription will get it and those that don't, won't.

I do highlight the subscription because the comment regarding response times has nothing to do with Alfresco choosing to not respond to your post. There isn't a guarantee that Alfresco will respond in any timeframe to a post as we have a separate forum for support issues.

That said, we do our best outside of dev and support issues to read and respond to the forum regularly.

For more detail on how our 2.2 deployment config wizard with excludes might assist you, you can take a look at our wiki.

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Deployment

Kevin