Thread: Staging to Production

ASPDNSF advises that one should have a development, staging and a production environment.

I have looked all over but I have not found much practical advice on how to set up and maintain a staging environment and then how to move data from the staging environment database to the production environment database. I am talking about the database; the .aspx etc. files are pretty straight forward.

For example, let's say I have created a topic on the staging environment and now I want to copy it over to the production environment. How do I do that?

Obviously, just copying the database will not work, because there are customers' data, sales history, etc on the production system.

What advice is available for how to do this?

Are there scripts for copying from staging to production without wiping out important stuff?

Am I just missing something? Or are development and staging environments used only for working with styles and templates and the real data is only maintained on the production system???

Your data for staging, development, and production should always remain seperate. If you decided to add an AppConfig or a custom report etc to the development server, and wish to migrate that to production along with the code release you should write a script to recreate the changes on production, but migrating data is asking to lose data integrity on production. If a topic was tested in dev, and alpha tested on staging and you wish to implement it on production, it should be as easy as using the production admin to "create the topic" as you did initially.

Thanks, that was not obvious to me.