[eluser]Myles Wakeham[/eluser]
Very interesting thread. Thanks to all for investing the time on it.
We share some similarities.... We too have our own boxes colocated, but we have 6 servers. And we also have some clients that prefer to run our code on their boxes and take care of their own hosting. Oh, and we also have development machines (our own personal laptops), a testing/staging platform on Fedora Core 5, and then there's all the production platforms.
The first challenge is in handling the migration from dev to test. That's not too bad because we all use Dreamweaver and we simply have the testing system as the deployment site and we just migrate all the files to that site. But then when a rev has to be moved to production, we have scripts that we have written that FTP the files to a predetermined folder structure on each production environment. Unfortunately the production environments can't share a folder with common code, so we have to manually duplicate the entire CI framework on each server. However if a single server runs multiple PHP apps that use CI, its conceivable that we could share a common code base there. The problem isn't technical, however. The problem is that each application needs to be tested and validated before being moved to production, and if there is a common problem in CI that all share, then all are affected. Its easier for us to validate each production system independently rather than hope that what works in one CI instance, will work just fine in all the other apps that share that code base.
Then it gets even more complex. We have developers in multiple countries around the world. They all have to check in their code to CVS before it gets moved to test. This not only includes PHP code, but SQL scripts for Firebird (our chosen SQL database platform). Also there are the HTML, Javascript, CSS and other files that all go together to make one system wholesome. Oh, and yes we use Smarty extensively as well.
I'm not trying to overload this thread, but my suspicion is that the original poster may well be on a journey towards the same end as we are and may in fact encounter these configuration management issues at a bigger scale shortly.
Myles
