Hi all.
I work for a web development company. We have our own custom CMS built in ColdFusion we have used for most of our clients front end facing sites.
We have recently started doing ASP.NET sites (MVC) with no CMS. Our process for deploying has always been
Develop incrementally. Developer pushes their changes to beta. A tester tests, developer makes updates, tester signs off, developer sends to PM. Once all updates for a release are ready. We push from Beta to Staging. A tester or PM goes through all updates on staging to verify that everything looks good. Any changes that are done are commited to beta tested there, then the full deployment is re-run on staging. Once we have a staging launch we are happy with the client reviews we get any notes and repeat the process until testers, PMs, and clients have all said it looks good. At this point we take the code and database updates that have been applied to staging and apply them to production.
We have a client that wants a ASP.NET project with a CMS, and I thought Umbraco looks really promising. Is this, or a similar workflow, possible with Umbraco? It seems weird to me that I have to select a database that cannot be based on environment. Is there a way to have a beta, staging and production database and code base, and push changes up to each?
We have just been using Visual Studios Deploy package and running the package deployment on each server, however since each Umbraco project seems to be tied to a specific database I am not seeing how this is possible.
I am a fairly experienced .NET developer, comfortable with database administration and all that stuff, but have basically no experience with Umbraco, just what I have read here and in the documentation. I have set up a local site and played around, using a SQL Server instance to run the database. I can deploy to our beta server and talk to the database fine, but what about when I want to deploy to staging and production and talk to different databases?
Is this something I would use Courier for, are there any free options? Or am I just doing something totally wrong?
Thanks,
Charlie
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://our.umbraco.com/forum/84072-umbraco-deployment-from-local-to-staging-and-production