How would I go about setting up a testing or “staging” site where I can test amember upgrades and mods before rolling those out on a production server? Setting up the site on another server using a subdomain is easily done. The problem I run into is amember is coded to rewrite the base address to the domain configured for the site. I did exactly that and discovered that trying to login to the admin page from the subdomain forwards traffic back to the original site because the amember database is set to a particular domain. I want to create a complete staging server with database and code base. Is it possible to set the database on the staging server to a subdomain so all testing can be done there?
Maybe it would be helpful if I asked this question in a different way. When amember releases a new version, how does everyone test for compatibility? Do you run the update on your live application and hope for the best? What if it fails?
Hmm, no replies yet. I would like to know the answer to this too. It's important to test an upgrade before rolling it out in production - especially since today I received an upgrade notification in the dashboard recommending I upgrade from 5.6.2 to 6.1.0, but that new version is still in BETA. I'll need to wait for a non-beta version before rolling it into production.
I am wondering the same thing. I am a little bit afraid of screwing something up. I guess I can just backup the install and roll it back if needed.
What we do is run a sub domain as the test server. The amember licensing allows you to use sub domains with your license, so the only thing that you would need to do is adjust the way you're writing the domain in your system. We have no problems using the same license key with multiple sub domains, so I'm not sure what you're doing that is preventing this for you... We simply use a duplicate of the live system, run the update in that. Before we update we do make sure the databases are both synchronised, but we always backup the site files and the db before we run an update. We also do quite a lot of specific mods in our systems, so we cannot simply run the auto update as it will overwrite some of the mods we've had to make. Using the staging site we get to fix those before we apply to live. As a rule, we would never apply an update to a live system without checking it on a test site first.
Sorry for the very long delay - we set it up for whatever we want it to be... staging.domain.com, dev.domain.com. test.domain.com... whatever seems right at the time.