I have many (like 30) shiny apps deployed on shiny server (open source version). It happens from time to time that when I (or one of my colleagues) update one of the packages, some of the apps stop working. I wonder if instead of checking all the apps manually every time we change anything, there is some way to perform the checks automatically? An ideal solution would be to have a script that is run daily (hourly?) checking if each app can be loaded and if not, an email is send. I am not taking about small errors here. More about app not loading at all due to in ex. some function missing. Any suggestions on how this can be achieved?
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Is there a way to run single Django app separately?
First, why ?
As we know, when you make a user upgrade or downgrade your system from UI inside system, if there a crash during replace changed files, then the system will break down.
Second, the solution.
if the UI of version control run separately, the user can redo the change to make system survive .
I have created an interactive Bokeh chart with various widgets which allow manipulation of the data. I now want to understand what is the standard way of sharing such a plot or how do I save it for sharing.
The plot is created with the curdoc method and then output to the Bokeh server using session.show().
#create current visualization using plot p and widgets inputs
curdoc().add_root(HBox(inputs, p, width=1100))
#run the session
session = push_session(curdoc())
session.show() # open the document in a browser
session.loop_until_closed() # run forever
Does the app trigger actual python code?
If not, you might consider reworking it as a non-server standalone document (using CustomJS callbacks, for instance). That would just generate a self-contained static HTML file that you could publish or send anywhere, and have it be immediately accessible.
If your app does rely on executing actual python code to do the work, then it needs to actually be running somewhere for users to interact with it. First off, I would suggest you make a real app that runs in the server, like the ones in the demo app gallery (see also Use Case Scenarios in the User's Guide). A real server app, i.e. one you run like bokeh serve myapp.py, is definitely preferred over using bokeh.client, especially for "publishing" scenarios (it will also be simpler/less code and more performant). Then, distributing the app could mean a few things:
You give them the script and they run bokeh serve app.py locally themselves
You "deploy" the app by leaving it running on a server with a URL that is accessible to users who you want to be able to see it
Depending on how much compute the app does, and how many users you expect at a given time, the second option could be as simple as running bokeh serve app.py somewhere. But if there is heavy compute or you expect a lot of traffic, you may need more sophisticated "scale out" deployments behind a load balancer. More information is in Deployment Scenarios in the User's Guide, and of course we are happy to help wth more extended discussions on the public mailing list. Finally, I should mention that in the near future, automated scalable publishing of Bokeh applications will be available as a feature on https://anaconda.org/
let me begin by saying I 'm a coldfusion newbie.
I 'm trying to research if its possible to do the following and what would be the best approach to achieve it.
Whenever a developer checks in code into SVN, I would like to do a get all the new changes/files and do an auto build to check if the code can be deployed successfully to production server. I guess there are two parts to it, one syntax checking and second integration test(if functionality is working as expected). For the later part some unit test tools would have to be used.
Can someone comment on their experience doing something similar for coldfusion.
Sorry for being a bit vague...I know its a very open-ended question but any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks
There's a project called "Cloudy With A Chance of Tests" that purports to do what you require. In particular it brings together a number of other CFML code analysis projects (VarScope & QueryParam) to check code, as well as unit testing. I am not currently using it myself but did have a look at it some time ago (more than 12 months) and it appeared to be quite good.
https://github.com/mhenke/Cloudy-With-A-Chance-Of-Tests
Personally I run MXUnit tests in Jenkins using the instructions from the MXUnit site - available here:
http://wiki.mxunit.org/display/default/Continuous+Integration+--+Running+tests+with+Jenkins
Essentially this is set up as an ant task in Jenkins, which executes the MXUnit tests and reports back the results.
We're not doing fully continuos integration, but we have a process which automates some of the drudgery of our builds:
replace the site's application.cf(m|c) with one that tells users that the app is being deployed (we had QA staff raising defects that were due to re-deployments)
read a database manifest XML which lists all SQL scripts which make up the current release. We concatenate the scripts into a single upgrade script, suitable for shipping
execute the SQL script against the server's DB, noting any errors. The concatenation process also adds a line of SQL after each imported script that white to a runlog table, so we can see what ran, how long it took and which build it was associated with. If you're looking to replicate this step, take a look at Liquibase
deploy the latest code
make an http call to a ?reset=true type URL to tell the app to re-initialize
execute any tests
The build is requested manually through the build servers we have, but you click a button, make tea and it's done.
We've just extended the above to cope with multiple servers in a cluster and it ticks along nicely. I think the above suggestion of using the Jenkins SVN plugin to automate the process sounds like the way to go.
I am trying to work out a good way to run a staging server and a production server for hosting multiple Coldfusion sites. Each site is essentially a fork of a repo, with site specific changes made to each. I am looking for a good way to have this staging server move code (upon QA approval) to the production server.
One fanciful idea involved compiling the sites each into EAR files to be run on the production server, but I cannot seem to wrap my head around Coldfusion archives, plus I cannot see any good way of automating this, especially the deployment part.
What I have done successfully before is use subversion as a go between for a site, where once a site is QA'd the code is committed and then the production server's working directory would have an SVN update run, which would then trigger a code copy from the working directory to the actual live code. This worked fine, but has many moving parts, and still required some form of server access to each server to run the commits and updates. Plus this worked for an individual site, I think it may be a nightmare to setup and maintain this architecture for multiple sites.
Ideally I would want a group of developers to have FTP access with the ability to log into some control panel to mark a site for QA, and then have a QA person check the site and mark it as stable/production worthy, and then have someone see that a site is pending and click a button to deploy the updated site. (Any of those roles could be filled by the same person mind you)
Sorry if that last part wasn't so much the question, just a framework to understand my current thought process.
Agree with #Nathan Strutz that Ant is a good tool for this purpose. Some more thoughts.
You want a repeatable build process that minimizes opportunities for deltas. With that in mind:
SVN export a build.
Tag the build in SVN.
Turn that export into a .zip, something with an installer, etc... idea being one unit to validate with a set of repeatable deployment steps.
Send the build to QA.
If QA approves deploy that build into production
Move whole code bases over as a build, rather than just changed files. This way you know what's put into place in production is the same thing that was validated. Refactor code so that configuration data is not overwritten by a new build.
As for actual production deployment, I have not come across a tool to solve the multiple servers, different code bases challenge. So I think you're best served rolling your own.
As an aside, in your situation I would think through an approach that allows for a standardized codebase, with a mechanism (i.e. an API) that allows for the customization you're describing. Otherwise managing each site as a "custom" project is very painful.
Update
Learning Ant: Ant in Action [book].
On Source Control: for the situation you describe, I would maintain a core code base and overlays per site. Export core, then site specific over it. This ensures any core updates that site specific changes don't override make it in.
Call this combination a "build". Do builds with Ant. Maintain an Ant script - or perhaps more flexibly an ant configuration file - per core & site combination. Track version number of core and site as part of a given build.
If your software is stuffed inside an installer (Nullsoft Install Shield for instance) that should be part of the build. Otherwise you should generate a .zip file (.ear is a possibility as well, but haven't seen anyone actually do this with CF). Point being one file that encompasses the whole build.
This build file is what QA should validate. So validation includes deployment, configuration and functionality testing. See my answer for deployment on how this can flow.
Deployment:
If you want to automate deployment QA should be involved as well to validate it. Meaning QA would deploy / install builds using the same process on their servers before doing a staing to production deployment.
To do this I would create something that tracks what server receives what build file and whatever credentials and connection information is necessary to make that happen. Most likely via FTP. Once transferred, the tool would then extract the build file / run the installer. This last piece is an area I would have to research as to how it's possible to let one server run commands such as extraction or installation remotely.
You should look into Ant as a migration tool. It allows you to package your build process with a simple XML file that you can run from the command line or from within Eclipse. Creating an automated build process is great because it documents the process as well as executes it the same way, every time.
Ant can handle zipping and unzipping, copying around, making backups if needed, working with your subversion repository, transferring via FTP, compressing javascript and even calling a web address if you need to do something like flush the application memory or server cache once it's installed. You may be surprised with the things you can do with Ant.
To get started, I would recommend the Ant manual as your main resource, but look into existing Ant builds as a good starting point to get you going. I have one on RIAForge for example that does some interesting stuff and calls a groovy script to do some more processing on my files during the build. If you search riaforge for build.xml files, you will come up with a great variety of them, many of which are directly for ColdFusion projects.
I just finished a Django app that I want to get some outside user feedback on. I'd like to launch one version and then fork a private version so I can incorporate feedback and add more features. I'm planning to do lots of small iterations of this process. I'm new to web development; how do websites typically do this? Is it simply a matter of copying my Django project folder to another directory, launching the server there, and continuing my dev work in the original directory? Or would I want to use a version control system instead? My intuition is that it's the latter, but if so, it seems like a huge topic with many uses (e.g. collaboration, which doesn't apply here) and I don't really know where to start.
1) Seperate URLs www.yoursite.com vs test.yoursite.com. you can also do www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/development, etc.. You could also create a /beta or /staging..
2) Keep seperate databases, one for production, and one for development. Write a script that will copy your live database into a dev database. Keep one database for each type of site you create. (You may want to create a beta or staging database for your tester).. Do your own work in the dev database. If you change the database structure, save the changes as a .sql file that can be loaded and run on the live site database when you turn those changes live.
3) Merge features into your different sites with version control. I am currently playing with a subversion setup for web apps that has my stable (trunk), one for staging, and one for development. Development tags + branches get merged into staging, and then staging tags/branches get merged into stable. Version control will let you manage your source code in any way you want. You will have to find a methodology that works for you and use it.
4) Consider build automation. It will publish your site for you automatically. Take a look at http://ant.apache.org/. It can drive a lot of automatically checking out your code and uploading it to each specific site as you might need.
5) Toy of the month: There is a utility called cUrl that you may find valuable. It does a lot from the command line. This might be okay for you to do in case you don't want to use all or any of Ant.
Good luck!
You would typically use version control, and have two domains: your-site.com and test.your-site.com. Then your-site.com would always update to trunk which is the current latest, shipping version. You would do your development in a branch of trunk and test.your-site.com would update to that. Then you periodically merge changes from your development branch to trunk.
Jas Panesar has the best answer if you are asking this from a development standpoint, certainly. That is, if you're just asking how to easily keep your new developments separate from the site that is already running. However, if your question was actually asking how to run both versions simultaniously, then here's my two cents.
Your setup has a lot to do with this, but I always recommend running process-based web servers in the first place. That is, not to use threaded servers (less relevant to this question) and not embedding in the web server (that is, not using mod_python, which is the relevant part here). So, you have one or more processes getting HTTP requests from your web server (Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, etc.). Now, when you want to try something out live, without affecting your normal running site, you can bring up a process serving requests that never gets the regular requests proxied to it like the others do. That is, normal users don't see it.
You can setup a subdomain that points to this one, and you can install middleware that redirects "special" user to the beta version. This allows you to unroll new features to some users, but not others.
Now, the biggest issues come with database changes. Schema migration is a big deal and something most of us never pay attention to. I think that running side-by-side is great, because it forces you to do schema migrations correctly. That is, you can't just shut everything down and run lengthy schema changes before bringing it back up. You'd never see any remotely important site doing that.
The key is those small steps. You need to always have two versions of your code able to access the same database, so changes you make for the new code need to not break the old code. This breaks down into a few steps you can always make:
You can add a column with a default value, or that is optional. The new code can use it, and the old code can ignore it.
You can update the live version with code that knows to use a new column, at which point you can make it required.
You can make the new version ignore a column, and when it becomes the main version, you can delete that column.
You can make these small steps to migrate between any schemas. You can iteratively add a new column that replaces an old one, roll out the new code, and remove the old column, all without interrupting service.
That said, its your first web app? You can probably break it. You probably have few users :-) But, it is fantastic you're even asking this question. Many "professionals" fair to ever ask it, and even then fewer answer it.
What I do is have an export a copy of my SVN repository and put the files on the live production server, and then keep a virtual machine with a development working copy, and submit the changes to the repo when Im done.