Managed by the Infrastructure Team, Testing Team and Wishlist Team, this is to have a daily test upgrade of most of our *.tiki.org sites. So anyone can check anytime how stable trunk (the next version) is with real world data. The name relates to our eat our own dogfood policy.

Challenges

• Dogfooding Tiki on our own sites is great to find bugs, but it makes it difficult to work.
• Say I find a bug on a tiki.org site, is it fixed in the next version, or should I report/try to fix bug?
  • This is very time consuming.
• Detecting and fixing bugs is much less efficient without real data. We would like to give developers access to a site where they can test a fix, before committing (or very quickly after)
• The Quality Team is supposed to check that a commit works in trunk, before accepting in the stable branch. How to do this efficiently without data?

Which is why we have set up a continuous Pre-Dogfood Server. Yesterday's data with tomorrow's code (code in trunk). Ideally, this would be part of TRIM so everyone in the community could easily set this up for themselves, but it's not at this stage.

Setup system for permanent testing of trunk with real data

1- Run a new site ex.: nextdev.tiki.org

• On a server we can give trusted devs access to test
• With backup of real data from dev.tiki.org
• Using trunk

2- Daily update of code (from trunk)
3- Daily refresh of data (from live site)

System Configuration

Use the following as per System Configuration

; To avoid bots indexing the site and losing SEO over duplicate content
preference.metatag_robots = "noindex, nofollow"   

; Testing changes shouldn't spam people 
preference.feature_user_watches = n

; Make it obvious to everyone that this is not real data
preference.sitesubtitle = "Pre-dogfood test upgrade server. Data refreshed daily."

; Set error report error reporting to all (useful for debugging)
preference.error_reporting_level = -1

; Make error reporting available to all users, not just admins 
preference.error_reporting_adminonly = n

; If you want to prevent user registrations, uncomment below
; allowRegister = n

Benefits

• Upgrade procedure is tested very frequently
• Makes it very easy to compare old & new interfaces (and people can say what they liked/want to keep about the old one)
• Make it easier for Tiki community to make a judgment on when to start dogfooding next version on community site.

Potential users

• All devs: To test before an upgrade. Ex.: They could load test daily and report any feature or performance regressions.

Ideas to improve

• all pre-dogfood servers should indicate in how many hours is next data refresh
• To make *.tiki.org upgrades easier, to catch regressions sooner, dev.tiki.org could run on monthly updates of trunk code, while nextdev.tiki.org is daily trunk. Before each monthly upgrade, nextdev.tiki.org is checked to catch and fix regressions.
• Change the domain name from trunk to next, because it's not always trunk, but always next done
• Tracker item: #4200 - - Compare generated HTML for all *.tiki.org sites between versions (to check for regressions/changes of behavior)
• Handle _htaccess
  • Use unix file link from .htaccess to _htaccess
• Find a solution for RewriteBase to avoid " The RewriteBase directive seems not to be set up correctly. This is required for sefurl to function correctly. The current value in .htaccess is / but the base url for this site is /trunk/ "
• Clear all cache Now part of the shell installer
• To be able to apply a profile or a System Configuration
• A way to receive alerts on major breaking
  • SQL error, PHP error
  • Would need a crawler for early detection of breakage
• To do the same thing, but for various profiles.

Related

• https://sourceforge.net/p/tikiwiki/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/doc/devtools/update.dogfoodserver.sh
• Continuous Integration

• Pre-Dogfood servers