I'm wondering if someone can enlighted me a little bit on the Xpages build process and how this works with other replica copies of a database. Much of the advice I've seen posted regarding working with the the Domino Designer indicates (logically), that you'll have much faster response working on local copies and then replicating those to the server.
I'll usually save my changes locally, build manually, and replicate to the server, and most of the time, that seems to work fine. However, on some occasions, I've found that when I view the work I've done in the browser on the server copy, it hasn't seemed to update... in fact in a couple of scary incidents, it displays a version from several weeks ago (where is it even getting that from??). This isn't a browser caching issue, and I've opened the design elements (xpages, custom controls) on the server copy and verified that the changes ARE there. I end up having to perform a Clean on the server copy (not just a build) of the application, and then it displays as expected.
This seems like a foolish question, but you shouldn't have to perform a build on each replica copy correct? Any thoughts as to what might be an issue here? There is another developer involved, and he works directly on the server as he's in the same location, but we are rarely working at the same time, and never on the same elements. We are not using source control at this time.
We have seen similar behavior ourselves.
In our case, we do development on a server, clean / build project and then copy that database as a template to a deployment server. From there, we update design in the production database.
We have noticed that build process sometimes fails, especially when working over slower links. So we always repeat clean / build / refresh process a couple of times and we try to do it while in office with fast connection between the work stations and the server.
We haven't experienced build problems lately, so this repeating of build process obviously helps.
We have also seen that replicating design between local and server copies sometimes causes build related problems, which could explain the problems you are seeing. We have stopped using replication because of that and are now always working on the server copy directly.
I don't think that your not-using of source control software has anything to do with it.
I usually do all changes inside local template, then perform "Project \ Clean", then update design in server database. It works in 99% of cases. If not, I perform "Project \ Clean" once again. I hate this, but looks like it's the only way to get consistent code on production.
Related
This wiki (https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Headless_Designer_Wiki) seemed to indicate that you can only create NSF under your Notes Data directory. I have done a couple of quick test and the only workaround I can find is to install Domino Designer on the same server as the target Domino server and set the target as the Domino data folder (i.e: C:\Domino\Data\sample.nsf instead of just sample.nsf).
The reason for this is I am trying to find an automated way of the following operation
Import ODP into workspace
Associate with a new NSF, but choose a Domino Server as a target
Does anyone have other workaround for this ?
I wish I had a more complete answer for you, but as this is still unanswered after a few days, I'll try to add some insight. It sounds like you have some experience getting headless DDE builds to work, so I won't focus on that. If you're looking for my take on headless DDE builds, I blogged on the subject a while ago, but since adapted the Jenkins CI based process I outlined there for a GitLab CI runner based solution, which I described in another SO answer.
Firstly, I would strongly recommend against setting your Designer target as the same as a server instance. This might work, but seems an unnecessary complication, and potentially issue prone, IMO.
My interpretation of your steps:
automatically receive updates (e.g.- on master branch, or all commits, etc.)
perform build via headless DDE
deploy built NSF
Splitting apart the logic for deploying of the built NSF is ideal here, since you have an asset that needs to be parked in a server path. The two main approaches I see are either:
having a dev/staging server that you can programmatically restart on demand
a more complex mechanism, in an NSF or server plugin, that will ingest the NSF's design and replace the design elements in a (newly created) destination NSF
As you can imagine, that last one is a bit tricky, but it was something I've left off working on, until I have more "free time". As for the former, you'll likely want someone with a bit of admin/operations skills set assist you, but in my mind there would be a total of three scripts involved:
one to down the destination server (this is why it should be a dev/staging server)
one to copy the built NSF to the destination file system path
one to start up the destination server
If you have a design task set to run at a certain interval and point the staging server for any changes, you could conceivable pull from that at whatever your interval is; nightly, etc. I hope the perspective helps.
All,
Have a QtWebEngine based application which uses all local html and javascript files. When deploying this to a test environment the Web page comes up and is navigable, but, webchannel based things aren't working. Everything is fine on development. Problem only happens on deployment to test machine.
This is a self contained .deb which installs creating a user and is meant to bring everything along with it. While it is running on a desktop, there is no network connection, everything is inside.
That said, if "everything" was inside the webchannel would be working. Does anyone have a link identifying what external pieces webchannel requires? There are only two oddities starting up on the target.
[0629/132921:WARNING:resource_bundle.cc(286)] locale_file_path.empty()
[0629/132921:WARNING:resource_bundle.cc(286)] locale_file_path.empty()
Trust me, I've surfed for that. There are thousands of posts flagging resource_bundle.cc throwing local_file_path.empty() errors at all kinds of lines and nothing offered as a solution. I am making the grand assumption when webchannel supporting files are identified and placed/pointed to, these will go away and life will be good.
qwebchannel.js is deployed, but, maybe there is an environment variable I need to set? the index.html file references qwebchannel.js exactly where it is.
Anyone have the list/link of what files are required when deploying something using qwebchannel.js? It isn't throwing up an error which identifies much.
Thanks,
Our current deploy process goes something like this:
Use grunt to create production assets.
Create a datestamp and point files at our CDN (eg /scripts/20140324142354/app.min.js).
Sidenote: I've heard this process called "versioning" before but I'm not sure if it's the proper term.
Commit build to github.
Run git pull on the web servers to retrieve the new code from github.
This is a node.js site and we are using forever -w to watch for file changes and update the site accordingly.
We have a route setup in our app to serve the latest version of the app via /scripts/*/app.min.js.
The reason we version like this is because our CDN is set to cache JavaScript files indefinitely and this purposely creates a cache miss so that the code is updated on the CDN (and also in our users' browsers).
This works fine most of the time. But where it breaks down is if one of the servers lags a bit in checking out the new code.
Sometimes a client hits the page while a deploy is in progress and tries to retrieve the new JavaScript code from the CDN. The CDN tries to retrieve it but hits a server that isn't finished checking out the new code yet and caches an old or partially downloaded file causing all sorts of problems.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that our CDN has many edge locations and so the problem isn't always immediately visible to us from our office. Some edge locations may have pulled down old/bad code while others may have pulled down new/good code.
Is there a better way to do these deployments that will avoid this issue?
As a general rule of thumb:
Don't do live upgrades. (unless the language supports it, but even then think twice)
Pulling code using git pull and then waiting for the app to notice changes to files sounds a lot like the 90's: uploading php files to an apache web server using ftp (or sftp if you are cool) and waiting for apache to notice that they were updated. It can't happen atomically, so of course there is a race condition. Some users WILL get a half built and broken site.
I recommend only upgrading your live and running application while no one is using it. Hopefully you have a pool of servers behind a load balancer of some sort, which will allow you to remove them one at a time and upgrade them.
This will mean that users will be able to use both the old and the new site at the same time depending on how and when they access it, but that is much better then not being able to access it at all.
Ideally you would be able to spin up copies of each of the web servers that you have running with the new version of the site. Check that the new version does work, and then atomically update the load balancer so that everyone gets bumped to the new site at the same time. And only once everything is verified to be working perfectly the old machines are shut down and decommissioned, or reused.
step 4 in your procedure should be:
git archive --remote $yourgithubrepo --prefix=$timestamp/ | tar -xf -
stop-server
ln -sf $timestamp current
start-server
your server would use the current directory (well, a symlink) at all times. no matter how long the deploy takes, your application is in a consistent state.
I'll go ahead and post our far-from-ideal monkey-patch that we're using right now.
We deploy once which may or may not go as planned, once we're sure the code is deployed on all the servers we do another build where the only thing that changes is the version number.
Then we deploy again server by server.
The race condition still exists but because the application code between the two versions is the same this masks the issue since no matter which server the CDN hits it gets the "latest" code.
I'm finding the BB/Eclipse environment incredibly unstable and wanted to know if I'm doing something fundamentally wrong here?
I build my project and it produces about 40 or so COD files... usually. Sometimes if I clean and run some COD files are missing and it fails to run (or worse it runs the old version somehow). I kid you not, I'm spending about an hour each time I want to run/test my setup which is an order of magnitude slower than the other platforms I work with. It eventually works by hitting the clean/debug/clean/debug/etc... and doing nothing else except these clean/debug/repeat steps.
If I make incremental changes to my src it's fairly reliable at picking them up but when I add a new resource via windows explorer and say 'refresh' on that directory in eclipse it's when all the problems start.
Any pointers from experienced Eclipse/BB users would be much appreciated (especially how to narrow down why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't).
Thanks,
Stuart
I believe I've narrowed down the issues. Firstly I use DropBox on the src but this has the inadvertent feature of backing up build files and can't find a way of disabling this.
If the files are locked by Dropbox it unsurprisingly fails, the catch is it doesn't say 'couldn't write to file as it's locked' or anything helpful like that... just fails. Obviously when I go to inspect it Dropbox has done it's stuff so the perfect crime!
My learnings:
disable Dropbox on COD producing builds.
When changing SDK version I found I have to
change the SDK via the build config settings,
clean,
exit eclipse,
delete the build directory with windows explorer,
Restart eclipse and hit refresh/clean.
That seems to build fairly reliably now. Without restarting Eclipse I get all sorts of wierd errors of files going to wrong locations and dirty data being picked up. The main one is any //#ifdef's are not picked up by the preprocessor correctly so get 1001 errors.
I'm working on a website with some other people. Usually when we want to modify something, we do the change on our machine and just upload the new version with ftp, hope it'll works (or that nobody will notice it doesn't the time we correct it) and that's it.
It's already not the best way to work alone but even less to work collaboratively so I'm asking advices.
I think that a solution like svn/git/mercurial could help me. I found bitbucket which allows free private repository with mercurial. But still after, how can I upload the changes I did to the ftp and make sure the version I've on my computer is the same than the one on the server.
We are all doing it during our free time (not paid) and some people comes and leave every year so I'm looking for something free, easy to use (explain to everyone why we should use a DVCS is already hard) and which doesn't rely on a specific person.
The server we are using to host the website is a cheap one and doesn't allow the use of ssh, svn,...
Thank you
Version control will not help with the issue you are describing - namely, uploading untested changes to a production site.
What you (and your team) need, is better quality control procedures - you need a test website and a tester (QA) person. The process would be:
Make a change
Update the test website
Have the update and the whole website signed off by QA
Update the production/live site
What you will gain by using version control (CVS, SVN, Git or anything else) is recoverability - you will be able to go back to a version before any breaking change. It will still not solve the issue of "the new code broke the site".
You want scheduled releases.
Commit and update code regularly
Code freeze or develop in a branch and merge to the trunk
test on a staging environment
Find a bug goto step 1
Release
You need to understand that what represents your latest correct working build is not what's on the server but in your source repository whether that be SVN or just the file system. Anything as long as it isn't the live server! Make sure everything works locally as expected then unless the site is huge (I guess not given your situation) deploy it in its entirety as a single version.