Promoting Alfresco from development to test environment

[pcharsle]

We have a standard application staging environment where we have our Alfresco application running on a development server, a testing server and a production server.

Once development of an iteration is complete we tag our source code and run a build process to move it to the testing server. Once the testers have successfully completed testing the application will be deployed to the production server.

Moving the modified source code between staging environment is straightforward. However, many of the changes that need to be migrated between environments are contained within the database. Currently, we manage this by (e.g. from development to test):

1) Using a script to dump the database table structure from the development database into an SQL script
2) Running the SQL script in the testing database to drop and recreate all the tables with the new data

Can anyone suggest a better way to manage this process?

[jpotts · Accepted solution]

Are you dumping the database and loading it because you are moving content within the repository between environments? If so, note that you also need to be moving the alfresco data directory (content store).

If that is what you are trying to do, depending on how much content you are moving between environments, you may want to look at using Alfresco Content Packages (ACPs). ACPs can be exported and imported between environments of the same Alfresco version without a problem.

Here's the wiki page on ACPs: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Export_and_Import

Hope that helps,

Jeff