Moving to SVN

lirit

Hey guys,

I am thinking of moving to SVN as you are actively updating it with fixes that I need and added features like the contacts applets. I am also confident it is mostly not broken and pretty much stable.

I am at a phase though where I have based all of my work on the latest version and I *think* I modified some of the non-modules files (though I'm not sure).

How would you advise to migrate to SVN?

Regards,
Liran.

jasiek

Liran,
We update our private SVN repository sometimes several times a day. Once updates are tested on local computers (Windows, Linux, IIS, Apache...) by team members we post updates to SVN on SourceForge. While possible that there could be some minor bugs it is assumed that the commit is very stable. Besides - this is why you have SVN and revert option 🙂

My advice is to setup 2 instances of epesi - development and production. Both of them can be set under SVN control. First get updates from SourceForge SVN to the development (test) version and check if everything works. If yes - update the production instance.

I always backup the database and the entire epesi directory of the production instance before making major upgrade. I hope you are doing the same. If you want to have the latest fixes and features - this is the fastest way to get updates - via SVN. To get production and development instances in sync most of the time it is sufficient to just:
[list:27st9aen][*:27st9aen]make a dump of the production database[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]empty the dev database[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]restore dev database from production dump[/*:m:27st9aen][/list:u:27st9aen]

For your specific setup:
[list:27st9aen][*:27st9aen]make a backup of your database[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]get the lastest epesi from SF SVN[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]set it up with a new database name[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]restore to this new database your backup[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]place your custom modules in respective directories (they will be out of SVN control, but you will never commit anyway)[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]if you have any attachments etc. you can sync data directory[/*:m:27st9aen]
[*:27st9aen]update your config.php file with new database name[/*:m:27st9aen][/list:u:27st9aen]

You should be able to get it up without running the setup from scratch.
For syncing - if you are using Windows - try this utility: http://www.fileware.com/products.htm#FileSync

lirit

Thanks.
I'm interested to know, can I just copy over the data directory from my own version of epesi to the new SVN version? (I'll be working from now on, on the SVN version)

lirit

Uhh... things got messed up... not nice.

I'll see if I can clear some things up, I'm currently unable to operate with epesi as it's broken.
My situation is not with having production and development versions but rather - I started out working with epesi by downloading the tar.gz package, unpacked it, then did all of my development on it.

I now want to move to using SVN so I can always update to latest version. My idea was to simply rename my current epesi dir to something else, then do an svn checkout to the original dir, then copy from the previous working epesi dir the required files to the original dir (the one with the svn version of epesi). I was hoping that I'd just need to copy the data/ directory, my modules and the data/config.php file but that didn't seem to work.

I had to fall back to actually installing the svn version with a new database and using the wizard. That got me to a working SVN version. I then just imported my previous database's dumpfile to the new database with svn epesi and that ended up in showing me this message upon login:

Updating epesi from version 1.0.2 to 1.0.3. This operation may take several minutes. Click here to 

proceed

which clicking on it resulted in an error:



Type: 2

Message: copy(data/Base_Theme/templates/default_he//__css.php) [<a href='function.copy'>function.copy</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory

File: /var/www/epesi/data/cache/common.php

lirit

I might got out of it -
Working on the svn directory version now, I renamed it's data/ dir to data_svn/ which is what it installed for me, then copied over my previous's version data/ to it, only keeping svn version's data/config.php

After this I was able to successfully login to the new (svn) epesi version and seeing my theme, language, modules activated and the rest of the settings.
This seems to be ok for now, I hope I'm not missing anything.

Just a note though, the sql dump of my previous epesi version is 1.6M in size, and I now dumped the new (svn) epesi database as backup and it's 405K in size... what do you think can explain that?

shacky

Hi,
to update epesi you need to unpack new version, and copy/move old "data" dir to newly unpacked "data" dir. Then enter epesi site and follow instructions. This works for official releases.
You cannot just update database, because some parts of data are in "data" dir.

With svn version you should, after moving "data" dir, enter address "http://<you site>/patches" and follow instructions.

This error means that you have outdated data dir - there is no such template like "default_he" in current data dir.

Epesi keeps sessions in database, session data can be pretty big. We also save in session_history table epesi status of every click - so we can navigate with browser back/forward buttons and restore old views. Summary = one online user can be up to 1MB in database (after about 100 clicks on page).

Regards
Paul

lirit

Ok so if I'd need to put it step-by-step bullets, to move from a previous version to svn,
I would do:

1. svn checkout
2. copy all of data/ of previous version to newly svn version's directory
3. navigate to http://<you site>/patches and continue from there? (this would mean that I wouldn't need to export/import the previous verions's database cause I'll be using the same one, which details are stored in data/config.php)

It's interesting to hear about all the data saved in the database... that would grow to a pretty big extent over-time. I'm assuming it's working like a log-rotate to only keep last 100 clicks or such? is it possible to do cleanups of such data?

Regards,
Liran.

shacky

It's autocleaned - it keeps up to 5 browser windows/tabs and up to 20 previous history snapshots, so summary is 100. Don't worry about session storage - we tested epesi with about 100 online users on "small company server" and it works fine.

Paul

shacky

Oh, about update - yes, it will update your database defined in config.php - no database snapshot/copying needed.
Backup database and data dir, just in case.

Paul

lirit

Thanks for the quick response,
that's also good to know about performance-wise.

Regards,
Liran.

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