I've been trying to wrap my head around this for a few days now. The solutions I come up with are a little complicated. Usually that is a red flag that I'm going in the wrong direction.
Anyway I'm trying to come up with solid, hands off, work flow from going from Dev to Prod with a Test Server in between.
Currently the project I'm working on hasn't been launched and so we do not have a prod server.
All of the developers work locally. The changes the devs make get committed to the repo and then get integrated into the Dev environment. We currently have a Dev Server and Test Server.
The Dev and Test Server databases are being handled very carefully by hand, and as soon as we launch this is going to be a problem.
This is how I propose we launch
Make a copy of the Test server. That copy becomes Prod. Create a Master-Slave Relationship between Prod and Test so the Data remains consistent. Launch the Site.
Every night take the data from Test and give anyone the ability to refresh their database with the most recent data.
Developers make changes to the schema, it gets tested, added to the repo, and goes up to dev.
The current data and the current schema gets merged in dev to verify the schema doesn't break anything. As soon as we are ready to launch the new version, we bring it up to Test.
Once all the changes are Tested and ready for launch we make a copy of Test, (Test2) and freeze Prod. Test becomes Prod, Prod's master/slaver relationship gets hooked to Test2, and Test2 becomes Test.
Please don't laugh, this is the best I can come up with.
Any feedback about why this won't work, or what I can do to make it better or tools to help out with the process would be great.
