Some projects need a staging site - somewhere where you can test and play around without messing up your database or webstats. Traditional applications require you to make a complete copy of your site to do this - and that means you need to sync your dev files with 2 remote locations.

With Symfony, for example, you can just point your staging domain or subdomain to the exact same location and set the environment on the fly.

This way you are using the exact same PHP files, but you have control over the usual environment settings such as database connection, application variables, email recipients etc etc.

In Symfony 1.2 you just modify your index.php controller like so:

<?php
##IP_CHECK##
require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/../../config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php');

//check for DEMO site
$env = "live";
$debug = false;
$domain = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if (strpos($domain,"demo") !== false){
  $env = "demo"; 
  $debug = true;
}

$configuration = ProjectConfiguration::getApplicationConfiguration('project_name', $env, $debug);
sfContext::createInstance($configuration)->dispatch();

Now just set your database in databases.yml

demo:
  propel:
    class: sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:        mysql:dbname=demo_database;host=demo_server
      username:   demo_user
      password:   demo_pass
      encoding:   utf8
      persistent: true
      pooling:    true
      classname:  DebugPDO

And finally, set your application settings in your app.yml

demo:
  contact_email: contact@demo.com
  #etc

If you want to make your staging/demo site appear differently, you can add a filter that inserts a stylesheet:

class demoFilter extends sfFilter
{
  public function execute ($filterChain)
  {    
    // execute this filter only once
    $env = sfContext::getInstance()->getConfiguration()->getEnvironment();
    if ($env = "demo" && $this->isFirstCall())
    {
      $this->getContext()->getResponse()->addStylesheet('demo','last');
    }
 
    // execute next filter
    $filterChain->execute();
  }
}

Note that the stylesheet should be set to 'last' to ensure you override your default styles.

You also need to add your filter to your filter.yml

rendering: ~
security:  ~

demo:
  class: demoFilter

#other filters go here  

functional_test: 
  class: swFilterFunctionalTest

cache:     ~
common:    ~
execution: ~

The handy thing about using a filter is that you can apply it to multiple applications in the same project. Now you can set a background image in demo.css

body {
   background-image: url(/images/demo.gif);
}

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Syndicated Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.