System Administration

Drush and cloning

April 12, 2014

I need to pull down a site I have on my other computer but haven't setup here for local development. I keep thinking there should be a 'drush clone' command... well there is but it clones modules not the way I'm thinking of. Basically the command I have in mind would:

  1. Clone the git repository of the site into the proper local directory.
  2. Copy the files from the production or developer site.
  3. Create the local database and sync from production or developer instance.
  4. Or instead of syncing the database do a site install if that's called for.

This requires of course that drush aliases already exist for the site. How to handle this and keep everybody in sync. Well, here's my stab at a highly configurable, very customizable drush configuration for people who work with one or more teams.

Occam's razor applies to technology too

January 23, 2008

Sometimes it takes a simple reminder that Occam's razor or the keep it simple stupid principles apply to most things in the technical realm just as it does to the real world.

In the server meltdown last week the data was all recovered but some problems with the backups made it impossible to get all of the file directories. The net result was a friend's WordPress blog melted down. Or at least all the goodies were gone. In the process of renewing the site and getting it updated a tagging plugin no-longer worked. As we talked this afternoon I looked through the database and figured out the schema and what was happening. Quickly enough I hit on a few simple queries and realized I could convert the data.

After another backup of the database it was time to set about migrating the data. The first query is:

INSERT IGNORE into wp_terms (slug, name, term_id) SELECT lower(replace(replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '.' , ''), "'", ""), "", '')) a, replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '-', ' '), '_', ' ') b, NULL
FROM wp_tags

That runs perfectly and it was time for step two. Or it was really time for step one. Not a major WordPress user I am not terribly familiar with the community. But it hit me that I was probably not the first person to be doing this. Maybe somebody else had published the SQL to make this process easier.

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