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Visit the siteAssisting a fellow Drupal agency to solve a deployment issue
The RCPCH (Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health), is a professional organisation for paediatricians in the United Kingdom. It is in charge of paediatricians' postgraduate training and administers the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health examinations.
Code Enigma is RCPCH’s hosting provider, managing their AWS service for them. In fact, in our other RCPCH case study you can read about how we ensured the anticipated spike in traffic during exam time would not crash, even when their budget was tight.e immediate term, the actual risk to production was fairly low.
About the project
What we did
The code in the pre-live branch differed from that in the live branch. As such, we renamed the existing pre-live branch and replaced it with a copy. This way, we were able to sync the live database down to the pre-live environment, then run an accurate test deployment before proceeding with the next live deployment.
We ran the overnight testing and checked the Jenkins build output. On investigation, it seemed that there were a few composer packages that were throwing warnings, but the main error seemed to be when the Drupal caches were rebuilt.
From the media entity database updates above, it looked like the deployment was trying to handle the switch from using the media contrib module to using media in Drupal core.
This can be challenging, as there are steps and sequences that have to be followed.
We have seen deployment issues like this before where multiple, incremental deployments have worked fine on development or stage environments, but when those changes have been merged through to the live site in one combined deployment, things fail due to the sequencing of updates and cache clearing.
As such, it's a good idea to test these deployments on a staging environment first, after syncing the live database down to give an accurate replica of the live environment.
We’re happy to report that we were able to fix the issue and get RCPCH upgraded to Drupal 8.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was the existing CMS of choice for the RCPCH.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
