Two CFwheels apps are mixing their configurations - coldfusion

I am working on an existing project that someone else started and I am having some really weird issues.
This is the rundown:
We had a cfwheels app running under test.com/admin and we wanted to make it a stand alone app to run under admin.test.com.
The developer who was in charge of the project copied the contents of the admin folder (the entire wheels app) and dumped them in a new folder. He also created a new site in IIS and mapped the physical path to run from the correct folder.
The problem now is this, when one app is running the other one is throwing an error which is telling me that the admin.test.com is pulling the contents of test.com/admin. Now if I do a reload=true and run the new application first, the new app is working and the old one is throwing an error.....
I know that this sounds a bit confusing but does anyone have an idea where to look and what I might need to change to make this issue go away?

If the application.name values are the same for both applications, then whichever runs first, configures them both.

Related

Dango bootstrap styling shows up fine on dev-box, not on production

I've got a Django site which uses the "django-machina" forum software, which in its latest incarnation apparently uses Bootstrap4 styling.
After installing the package according to directions, it looks beautiful on my development box. But, when I deploy exactly the same software on production, Bootstrap obviously isn't running because nothing is properly styled.
There are no 404's and no console messages. *(Yes, I remembered to run manage.py collectstatic ...) There are some stylesheets complaints from Firefox but they're identical in both cases. But ... the display is not!
Can anyone suggest what I might do in order to solve this problem? I'm stumped!
Well, once again I answered my own question!
I correctly guessed that, since I was maintaining the remote site from my own box using rsync, there might be some garbage left over on the remote side that wasn't being swept-up. (I can't use rsync --delete for fear of smashing directories that contain images and uploaded materials.) I guess it would probably be smarter for me to start using an external repo so that git can do for me what it's designed to do ...
But anyway, when I deleted selected directories containing the central and most-often updated directories, then used rsync to replace them with clean copies, the interference went away and production now looks correct.

JavaScript Bundle getting build every time it finish building. Expo XDE

Hope you guys can help me with this weird issue I'm facing.
The app bundle is getting build everything time it finishes building. So its like once it gets to 100% it starts all over again. One thing I made to kind of solve it, is to enable the "Remote debugging" option on the expo App. But that will only work for a minute and will start the loop of building the bundle again.
I have also reinstalled the node_modules & cleaned expo cache but nothing seems to be working.
Ok, I found it. It was because of iCloud Drive on MAC. For some reason that I don't understand (since it did not happen before under the same conditions) the refresh of the files is forced.
So move your app folder to another place that is not on iCloud Drive and it will work.
Hope this will help.
It was Dropbox sync causing my issue.
Most of the time you shouldn’t need to rebuild your APK on every change, you should only need to run exp publish to see your updated app show up in your existing APK. If you change anything in app.json you’ll need to run the build again, but if you aren’t touching app.json then you should be mostly fine to just publish and not run a standalone build.

How to clone a Django project without breaking it?

I built a (relatively simple) Django project following a tutorial (the recently released Hello Web App book.) I committed my changes along each step of the way, and I have my working solution in a github repo. However, when I clone the code into a new work space such as onto a new machine or into a new slot on a cloud IDE, the app doesn't work. I get a few errors and with each I resolve, another pops up. Basically, my environment is totally messed up and incompatible with the app beyond having Python and Django both installed.
I realize that I can read through the error messages I get when I invoke runserver, solve each one by one, etc. but it seems there should be a cleaner/simpler way to be able to pull down my repo to a fresh workspace and have it up and running in just a minute or two. I've read recommendations about using virtualenv, but it also seems like people discourage including venv inside your repo because of the extraneous commits and added bulk that will result from it so I don't think that actually solves my problem of trying to reduce new workspace configuration effort.
Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but I'm hoping someone can give me a recommendation to avoid the need to workout these kinks each time I start fresh.

Is there an ideal way to move from Staging to Production for Coldfusion code?

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.

How do I run one version of a web app while developing the next version?

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.