Please, web app developers, consider how your users will upgrade. If your upgrade process is "remove the old one, unzip the new one", then it's not an upgrade process. It's an encouragement to never upgrade.
@Crell Do you have some recommendation on how to address that on a self-hosted #php app?
I maintain one which suffers from this and I would like to eventually address it, but I have never found an approach where there's no risk of breaking things without an easy way to roll back.
I provide a CLI tool which helps, but still requires you to manually "download and unzip".
@acelaya I don't have a very easy solution. I've seen "checkout from Git and change your tag", "Composer update," and self-modifying updaters (eg, Nextcloud, or the Platform.sh CLI app).
I think an update CLI command is probably the best option for non-cloud envs. In concept it could make its own backups and do the download for you from GitHub, using the API. Though that is admittedly more work.
@acelaya Another option I've attempted myself is to put virtually all the code into dependent Composer packages. If there's nothing not-in-composer to update, then a composer-update will do everything.
That helps, I think, but sadly does have an upper bound on what you can move out of the main app. And requires someone have composer installed.
@Crell@acelaya I've used Ansistrano - https://ansistrano.com/ - for a few projects, that run on small vps', to automate steps I used to do manually. Not sure if applicable to this question though 😅
I can integrate it in my app to deploy it in production.
I need to have a git repo on the server (mainly for private repo). And it configurable with y'all config.
But with a cli command, the component will:
creates an export of given tag
extracts it in some place
runs composer install
can run some other commands
copies secret files into app dir
create a symlink (for apache)
In case of problem, I redo a symlink on previous version
@sarah Trying to upgrade Koel (Laravel-based self-hosted music streamer, pretty nice), and... there's a reason I haven't bothered to upgrade in a while.
@ralphschindler Probably? That's a larger lift than I have time for right now. I just want to upgrade my app and figure out why the search function doesn't work.
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