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General Questions /

General questions about getting started with SilverStripe that don't fit in any of the categories above.

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

Shared, multi-site hosting and subversion best practices


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3 Posts   2352 Views

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geoffmcqueen

Community Member, 11 Posts

31 May 2010 at 2:43pm

I'm wondering whether any of the experts here can provide any advice on the best way to set up a shared server to host multiple SilverStripe powered websites on a single server. We're already using named based virtual hosting, and my preference is to have a common core version of the Sapphire framework and the CMS directory, as well as other components that are commonly shared. However, hard drive space is cheap, and from what I've seen it might be easier and give us more flexibility to keep it all together and have n copies of Sapphire for each site.

The second aspect, beyond the deployment, is the management/ maintenance of sites on an ongoing basis. Through the use of the SVN:externals method, I'm wondering whether we can create our own repository for the 'mysite' content, and then tell via externals tell the SVN client when they do an update of the whole site, they should also check/update the Sapphire and CMS content from the main SVN repo.

Does anyone have any advice about this? I can see there are potentially a lot of pitfalls - particular as upgrades should be managed, with a minimum of surprises, as well as the Sapphire and CMS folders not really being "common", but instead being able to retain our own versions and configuring things as we like, only merging in changes in SS versions deliberately and occasionally - so any advice from the trenches would be much appreciated...

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Willr

Forum Moderator, 5523 Posts

31 May 2010 at 5:07pm

Hi Geoff,

Great question. I think there is no 'right' answer but it depends on your setup. For me personally each of my sites is very separate to each other (one might be on 2.3 and the others on 2.4, trunk) so I mantain completely separate sapphire and cms folders for each (managed via externals though). This means if I upgrade one then it won't break the other sites which is what I like. Also upgrading is a matter of changing the externals on the particular site I want to upgrade or simply running svn up to keep it up to date.

Some firms I've worked with have 1 sapphire and 1 cms folder and symlink those 2 folders into each project. This has a number of benefits namely you can update all your sites in 1 hit and saving on diskspace, downside is you can also break all your sites in 1 hit :D.

The SS development team strives to keep branches/2.3 and 2.4 stable for day to day usage so I just run my cms, sapphire externals directly off the svn server rather than use my own copy of it (unless you need to keep your own copy and merge individually).

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biapar

Forum Moderator, 435 Posts

1 June 2010 at 12:39am

I think is good to have one site, one install....