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rainlab / deploy-plugin

A simple way to deploy your application to a remote location.
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Deploy Plugin

A simple way to deploy your application to a remote location.

Requirements

Installation

php artisan plugin:install rainlab.deploy

Why is This Plugin Needed?

This plugin helps in cases where your remote server (production, staging, etc) cannot use composer or where shell access is limited, an example of this is shared hosting.

How It Works

The Deploy plugin works by creating a secure channel between your local developer environment and your hosting server. Plugins, themes and core files are then compressed and sent securely to your server and then installed remotely. This approach is similar to an update gateway, except files are pushed to the server instead.

Upgrade Older Versions of October CMS

You may use this plugin as a solution to upgrading your website to a newer version of October CMS, for example, if want to upgrade a v1 website to use v2. Always take a complete site backup before performing these steps.

  1. Install or upgrade to the latest October CMS version locally on your machine
  2. Deploy the Beacon files to the older site you want to upgrade
  3. The Deploy plugin will attempt to upgrade the site during its first deployment

If you need support with this process, feel free to send an email to the helpdesk.

Documentation

Before starting, you should have set up a new site in your hosting manager and ideally have an empty database. You may also apply these instructions to an existing website, including legacy versions of October CMS, however, please make sure you have taken a complete backup in case something goes wrong.

For safety, the deploy plugin will never delete files. It will overwrite and create new files only. If you need to delete something, you should do it directly on the server.

Control Panel Setup

After installing this plugin, navigate to the Settings > Deploy in your October CMS control panel and click Create Server.

  1. Enter the web address for your site (eg: https://mycpanelwebsite.tld/)
  2. Generate a new RSA private key, or enter an existing one to set up an existing server
  3. Download the Beacon ZIP files

Beacon Deployment

In your Beacon ZIP file, you should notice the following files:

You can upload these files anywhere and they will become a target for deployment of October CMS. You can use FTP or the file manager in your hosting control panel.

Important: The directory where the files are uploaded must be writable by your web server (eg: permission 755 for apache).

Run Your First Deployment

Once you have the Beacon installed remotely and the server set up locally. It's time to perform your first deployment.

Troubleshooting Beacon the Response

Sometimes you may see an error that a valid response from a beacon was not found.

The first thing to try is the "Check Beacon" link to make sure the beacon is Active, if it says Unreachable, try downloading the beacon files and uploading them again to your server.

You can perform more advanced troubleshooting by capturing the raw response from the server or beacon. To capture the raw response from the beacon, do the following.

  1. Add ?debug=1 to the end of the URL in the backend.
  2. Click Check Beacon or perform the deployment action again.
  3. Check the log file in storage/logs to see what the server is responding with.

This should hopefully provide some insight in to why the response was not accepted.

Using .deployignore to Ignore Files

There are times when you don't want specific files to be deployed, such as the node_modules directory used in plugins and themes. This is possible by creating a .deployignore file in the base directory of your plugin or theme. This file behaves the same as .gitignore file where you can configure Git to ignore files you don't want to check in.

The following .deployignore file will exclude the node_modules directory:

node_modules/

The file must be located at the base directory of the theme or plugin. For example:

License

This plugin is an official extension of the October CMS platform and is free to use if you have a platform license. See EULA license for more details.