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Deploying

This topic explains deployment procedures in Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP), such as publishing of code, database, and content between the different environments.

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How it works

You can deploy solutions from your development environment to any cloud environment, as code packages. You can also move database and BLOBs between environments using the source environment API.

See also DXL Cloud API for Deployment REST APIs,

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Caution

After going live, you can no longer overwrite the production database using the deployment API.

Optimizely takes care of the the following as part of the service:

  • Setup of environments.
  • Initial troubleshooting and roll-back if issues arise.

Deployment to production

The following image illustrates deployment from a local development environment to Production. In this scenario the production environment is "empty" at the beginning.  You first create code and content in your local development environment, and then push this to your Integration environment. You then deploy to Preproduction and validate that everything works as expected. When ready, you can deploy to Production.

Continuous deployment 

After the first deployment, website users edit content in the Production environment. As part of the upgrade process, you can move content from Production_back to the _Preproduction and  _Integration_environments, where developers can add new solution updates. See Deploying code changes.

Deployment methods

You can deploy either using deployment tools for a version-controlled team development environment, or through Visual Studio using the Optimizely extensions and publish profiles. In both cases you need to contact Optimizely before you deploy for the first time, to get the needed deployment integration settings information.

You can use any deployment tool that supports Azure Resource Manager (ARM), for example Octopus Deploy, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server or TeamCity.

Important notifications

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Note

Read through and follow the recommendations below to make deployment as smooth as possible.

  • Make sure that the software you deploy supports Azure Web Apps. See Requirements for supported software and components.
  • To avoid data loss or corruption, if you have breaking changes where the old version of the sites' code cannot work with the new version of the database, deploy using maintenance page when you deploy database schema updates or changes to content types .  The target site is then taken offline showing the (customizable) maintenance page. If a deployment contains these type of changes, inform Optimizely when ordering deployment to production. You should also ensure that either the major or minor version is incremented to trigger the initialization module to make the necessary updates.

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Note

If your changes are additive and do not break the sites when the old and the new code runs in parallel during deployment, you can deploy without using maintenance page.

  • When you deploy to a production environment, ensure that you apply the correct configurations.  Never use credentials, tokens, or endpoints from a Preproduction environment, in Production. You can set up environment-specific configurations that automatically apply depending on the environment; see Environment configurations.
  • If you use add-ons on the site, ensure that you include the modules and modulesbin folders in the project so that these are published. Publish the database schema on the first publish operation only.
  • You must install add-on modules to the _Integration _environment via NuGet to work with the DXC Service deployment process. The default configuration prevents users from installing add-ons on a production website; do not change this.
  • Before you deploy, add a wildcard binding to the site in the Manage Websitesscreen. This  helps to prevent failures due to URL-dependent code when migrating the database between environments. See the following image, which shows an example of this binding.
    1. Select Admin > Configuration > Manage Sites.
    2. Click Add and add a wildcard (*) Host Name.

Related topics

Updated 2 months ago

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