Orchestrator

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Git Workflow

Use Orchestrator to go from dev to production for your MODX websites. To add any MODX Elements like Chunks and Templates, create these via Blend Migrations that can be saved to your git repo and then simply ran on the remaining servers to quickly and accurately deploy your updates.

Note Orchestrator does not install or update MODX, you will need another tool to do that.

Suggested git setup

  1. Include all MODX files in git minus a few config files and cache. This helps a lot when creating any PHP code as you can use your IDE to help auto complete. Note Orchestrator does not update MODX versions, so this is still a manual process or via MODXCloud to update.
  2. Optionally include all core/vendor files in git. This speeds up deployment but make sure you have the same PHP version on all servers or set your deployment PHP version in core/composer.json
  3. Create an .ignore file, basic example below
  4. Now create a branch for every server that you wish to have, for example dev for development and master for production. Another common branch would be staging for a middle staging server to show for stakeholder approval before deployment to production.

.gitignore basic example 

# modx
/assets/components/phpthumbof/cache/
/assets/cache/
/connectors/config.core.php
/core/cache/
/core/config/config.inc.php
/core/config/lci_console_env.php
/core/packages/

!/core/vendor/bin/
!/core/vendor/**/bin/
/core/vendor/lci/console/src/cache/env.php
/config.core.php
/manager/config.core.php

# Local project
/core/components/blend/database/history/

Deploy on a server

Orchestrator has a deploy command that will check your related config files to install or update any defined MODX extras as well as run your local project migrations and any new migrations for packages.

cd /www/
git pull
 ...
cd /www/core
php vendor/bin/orchestrator deploy

How is Orchestrator different from Gitify?

Gitify is also a good solution for saving your MODX content and elements to files to allow a git workflow. One advantage to Blend Migrations is that it abstracts IDs so you can have many developers working on different migration scripts without having any ID collisions or overwrites. Another is you can create and share scripts that can be reused for any website.