How do you handle updating CodeIgniter for client websites?

[eluser]jleequeen[/eluser]
Hello All,

I would like to start developing all my client websites using CodeIgniter. The one issue I am struggling with is how to keep them up to date when a new version of CI comes out. It would not be a big deal to update for instance 10 sites, but if you had 50+ sites, then manually doing it would not be feasible.

That's the one thing about client sites that I don't enjoy, and that's maintaining them when I don't need to. If I wrote them in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS/PHP then I would not have anything to update. But I also realize the power of CodeIgniter and would like to leverage that for all my client sites.

Any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

[eluser]kanjimaster[/eluser]
We host most of our clients' sites so have a directory near each server's root with each version of CodeIgniter. We then point each client's site to this folder via the index.php file.

This way each time there's a new version of CodeIgniter we need only upload the new version once per server, and then update each site's index.php to use it.

The updates of the index.php files could be automated via a script, though in practise we haven't as it's still a good idea to do some level of regression testing to ensure that the upgrade hasn't upset anything.

We also use HMVC to modularise each site very aggressively and then reuse those modules on other sites, which substantially reduces the total amount of regression testing due.

My recommendation too is that you don't think in isolation about the extra time to spent upgrading. It's very small compared to the amount of time you'll save on developing sites in the first place.