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by Talented

I was just thinking about the site maintenance strategy I use on VM servers and wondered if, maybe one day, Webinoly will be able to do it too?

What I am talking about is clicking a button which duplicates the site and attaches a floating IP to the copied version.

You then have an exact copy of your production server without interrupting the service, and you can simply transfer the floating IP back to the updated site when everything is ready and working. 

It could also be used for redundancy in case of a system fault on your main server.

Webinoly doesn't have access to a pool of IP addresses so the "floating IP" bit would need to be a change of A record in your DNS zone, but free DNS hosting at Cloudflare makes that super quick and easy.

All that's needed is for Webinoly to be able to make an exact duplicate site with something like...

sudo site example.com -clone-from=example.com -replace-content=off -inherit=[ssl-cert,force-redirect,default-site, tools-site,custom-nginx]

... so that everything would be inherited to the cloned site exactly as-is.

by Talented

I am not familiar with the topic, but from what I've read here and there, doesn't the second part of the request sound like load balancing to some degree?

Other than that, keeping a staging and a live site in sync seems a bit complicated in some parts. On this topic we 've discussed a few of the challenges. The way I see it, the staging site cannot always be an exact replica of the live one. For example, you will probably need to turn caching off, remove a few plugins or add some others etc.

It seems to me that there are two different requests here. One is a mechanism where you keep your backup site in complete sync with the live and use it as a failover.

The other is an easy way to manually update the staging site with the content of the live whenever you need to.

In any case, the ability to run certain Webinoly commands like -clone across different servers would be really interesting.

In fact, there is one thought that kept buzzing me for some time but I thought that it would be too far-fetched and hyper-ambitious. What if we could use one server as the Control Panel of many other servers? I mean, being able to run all Webinoly commands from one server, or even from our local installation, and execute them on another Webinoly server. Some of the commands could even be run in a batch across different servers. For example, site -list -global would list all sites across all our connected servers. It would be like a command-line version of popular control panels like GridPane.

by Talented
The first part -- I agree with your analysis.

The hyper-ambitious bit -- I agree, with a project like Wibinoly it would be hyper-something. It's going to take a suite of tools with an underlying framework and probably virtualisation. And that's not Webinoly. Or at least, maybe Cristhian dreams about it, but its not on the roadmap. Not yet.
by Expert

I think one of the most difficult parts of managing a project is about keeping the project inside a very well delimited scope. Of course, very often I see or read things that make me dream about a lot of wonderful features.

You need to plan your project, not be planned daily on the way!

Control panels like GP or Runcloud are focused on providing "top-notch" support to their users (not servers). That's their main business and that's the segment of users they are focused to attend.

Webinoly is focused on "servers", we don't provide support, our ideal segment of users is people that already know about these things or are willing (and have the time) to learn. If you already know about NGINX and servers, Webinoly will make your life a lot easier.

As you can see, they are two very different visions about this "business". Recently, I wrote about this in our FAQ page and is the first question on that page.

Of course, that not means we won't change the course of this project in the future. Who knows! Anything can happen!

The only thing I can say for sure is that you will keep seeing more and more new features and improvements in the near future. There's still a lot of job to do!

I really appreciate the opinion of you both guys. You always make me think about the roots and deep concepts of this project. Thanks!

by Talented

Just keep doing what you're doing Cristhian and it will all work out fine in the end. And if it didn't work out fine yet, then its not the end.  laugh

1 Answer

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by Expert
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Best answer

Keeping 2 or more servers in sync for redundancy is a little bit more complicated than that. Actually, that's exactly what I do with the Webinoly sites, including this. We have one server in America and another in Asia perfectly replicated in real-time with a failover mechanism and all of those fancy perks. Maybe in the future we could see it as a native feature in Webinoly. Who knows! wink

Basically, you need to keep your files and database synchronized all the time instead of just having a copy/clone as you suggest. 

Check this post: https://webinoly.com/support/3871/feature-suggestion-migrate-site-from-another-server

by Talented
Yes, I have to agree about keeping separate servers/sites in sync. I don't know if rsync is up to the job as I have never used it on a continuous basis. The redundancy thing was just an afterthought.

The real need I have is to find a simple way to clone an exact copy of a site and keep it online while I work on fixing/updating/modifying the original. So the fact that it's on the same server is a bonus.

The way "staging" site works at present is OK for development. However, Production and Staging sites have to be on different domains/subdomains, so it would also make that task very much easier, quicker, simpler etc.

The thing I couldn't get straight in my mind is how NginX would know which of the two sites (or maybe more) to respond with.

But I do know one thing for sure.

You do.  :-)
by Expert

I've seen some tools like ServerPress and WPSiteSync, just to mention a few, that are focused on the development cycle.

by Talented
Ah, no. They are not what I mean. I am talking about maintaining live sites/servers, not developing new ones.
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