One WP…several servers?

Graveshow
(@graveshow)

13 years, 6 months ago

Sorry if I am posting this in the wrong area, but since it deals with getting started I figured the “Installation” forum was the best place to start.

First, I’ll explain our set-up, then what we need to do, and hopefully someone can either help or point me in the right direction.

For security reasons we have 3 “servers” set up: Development, Staging, and Live. I have servers in quotations for reasons I will explain in a second. We do all of our new development, design and modification on the Development server, and once approved we move it to the Staging server where it is QA’d. Once it passes muster, we have an automated tool that pushes the new files from the Staging to the Live. No one ever physically touches the Live, and in this way, if a piece of code hoses the entire environment, its only shown on the Staging, and never goes live where it can affect the site visitors. “Servers” is in quotes above, because our live server is both load balanced and backed up…so the Live is actually 3 physical servers, Server 1, Server 2 and a Fail Over server in case of an outage.

We want only ONE blog, but, it will have to be edited on the Staging server for QA before being released to Live. We dont at any time want anyone using an admin on the live facing servers to edit the blog. And when updated, the updates need to be propogated in all three places.

Hopefully all of that made sense so you can understand my questions….someone has got to have an answer here.

Question one: Does anyone know how we can set the WP blog up on JUST the staging server, and once blog entries are approved, push the entries to the live?

Question two: Would these entries only push to one place? Could we have them push to all 3 live servers?

Hopefully someone out there understands what we’re trying to do and can send us down the right road.

Thanks.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

Thread Starter Graveshow
(@graveshow)

13 years, 6 months ago

*****UPDATE: I would post this in advanced, but, only admins can do that.

So here is what we did. We installed WP on both of our load balanced servers, lets call them S1 and S2, and we pointed them both to a Database on one of our DB servers, we’ll call it DB1.

S1 runs fine, gathers info from DB1, displays it, does everything a WordPress installation is supposed to do.

S2 is full of issues. It points to DB1, but on the load of the pages, S2 thinks it is S1, and since it isnt, the page is full of errors.

There HAS to be a way to do this. With companies as big as CNN and the New York Times using WordPress, and they have to be balancing their traffic across dozens of servers….they cant possibly be running and independent install of WP, and the DB on every single server, can they?

All we’re trying to do is set up one blog, that acts like one blog, but shares the info on two servers for load balancing reasons…?

Please help.
Thanks

esmi
(@esmi)

13 years, 6 months ago

Moving to WP-Advanced as requested.

elvisjorge
(@elvisjorge)

13 years, 6 months ago

Hello everyone.-

I’m new using WP, but I want to do something and for that I need to modify some modules of WP, some of you could explain me what does mean this get_setting(‘home_keywords’) the only thing that I know about it is that get the keyword that is going to pun in the web, but how is get it???

Thanks

Sixgunzx
(@sixgunzx)

13 years, 6 months ago

@graveshow I can’t tell you exactly how to do this, but it seems to me like the big issue you are having is the options in the db. There would have to be a different db table for S2 to call it’s links from. Now, if you are a php wiz, then you should be able to modify the db call a slight bit on S2, to load the different data from the new database table. The table basically would have to have your URL information or general settings.

Sixgunzx
(@sixgunzx)

13 years, 6 months ago

@elvisjorge Where did you find this function? get_setting(‘home_keywords’)? I even googled it, and came up empty. I find plenty on getsetting(‘home’) which aggregates your home URL, but nothing on get_setting(‘home_keywords’)

elvisjorge
(@elvisjorge)

13 years, 6 months ago

@Sigunzx I found that function in meta-keywords.php, and there are many way to use get_setting and I know it because I found in severeal scripts that function on diferent wayt\.

Thanks

olddocks
(@olddocks)

13 years, 6 months ago

Question one: Does anyone know how we can set the WP blog up on JUST the staging server, and once blog entries are approved, push the entries to the live?

Question two: Would these entries only push to one place? Could we have them push to all 3 live servers?

All you need is 4 IPs and 1 ip for database server and rest other 3 ips for running a web server where you host your wordpress blog.

All webservers running will remotely connect to mysql database server in that way all blogs will be sync.

Finally, you will need to change DNS zone file and assign round robin DNS to your webservers like ww1, ww2, ww3 and db pointing to those IPs. This is how i would imagine to work.

Do also consider WordPress MU: http://mu.wordpress.org

Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
(@ipstenu)

🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

13 years, 6 months ago

WPMU is now WordPress Multisite: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

mardala
(@mardala)

13 years, 3 months ago

I don’t think is totally answers your question, but something we did for having a wordpress driven site on 4 servers. 3 delivery servers are managed behind a proxy, so the 3 servers all think they are the same domain.

We created an admin subdomain. The admin subdomain is where all writing, uploading, editing etc is done.

By simply hard coding in wp-config.php we set the admin server to ingore the site url and home url in the database.

e.g.
// ADMIN:
// define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://admin.site.com’);
// define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://admin.site.com’);

// DELIVERY:
// define(‘UPLOADS’, ‘http://cdn.site.com/uploads’);

Note – We also have a cdn. The CDN is on the same physical server as the admin, so its just a simple symlink from the uploads directory to the cdn root.

As far as having a staging – live environment that would be a little more tricky and can’t think of a solution off the top of my head, but brings up an interesting point.

phrees
(@phrees)

13 years, 3 months ago

It sounds like your mixing together “staging server” with “editorial workflow”.

Try separating the issues.

You might get some inspiration by looking at the way Magnolia handles this. See the “Instances” section in

http://www.magnolia-cms.com/magnolia-cms/tech-briefs/performance.html