Hello I'm trying to host an Umbraco site and would like to have a staging site in addition to the production site. I want the staging site to be on a subdomain of the actual site, something like site.staging.myawesomesite.com. I set up the subdomain with a URL Rewrite rule in the main Web.config that rewrites the subdomain to the staging site's directory. This works for the most part. However, Umbraco is kinda flaky when being run from a subdirectory, even with the rewrite. It likes to append the subdirectory to the paths (images, links, etc.) in the database. This is a known problem in Umbraco, but they haven't fixed it. It's unfortunate that Umbraco is this way as I find it essential to have a staging environment. Is there a way I can set up the staging site as it's own separate site, without eating one of the sites provide in the multisite plan? It would be great if Everleap provided one staging site per actual site! Thanks Jacob
Afraid not. The beta project that Everleap rose out of was called Snapp, and we had staging there. It was kind of a hack (we just switched IPs between the live site and the staging site), but it worked. And I seem to recall that's actually the way they do (or did) staging on Azure as well. Not sure why the staging concept didn't come to Everleap from Snapp, I always thought it was a useful feature. I'm not sure it was utilized very much.
The staging system is still on our list of potential product enhancements. With Everleap the architecture changed so the staging system we had on Snapp wouldn't port over so easily. We would need to rework it. We didn't put emphasis on it since we had the Multi-site plan where you could have one site as production and one site as staging.
That's not a staging site though. It's just the same site with a different IP address. I'm talking about two separate sites, where you can work on the staging without messing up the live. I see. Well, consider this a nudge for implementing staging sites . In the meantime, I'll use the multi-site feature.
Yeah, I was just informed that's not the way we did it at all. D'oh! Azure did the IP switch. We pushed the site from staging to the live directory (overwriting what was there) and maintained backups of the former live site for rollbacks, etc. It was more of a true staging platform than Azure, and it avoided some of the confusion around Azure "staging." In any event, we didn't carry that particular feature over to Everleap, but if the demand was there it would certainly be something we could revisit. Your nudge is duly noted.
