Deployment

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Considerations for the Deployment Environment
• Considerations for the Development Environment

Introduction

This document describes various aspects of deployment in relation to the EPiServer CMS platform. In many large organizations, the actual content production is often done in a protected corporate zone instead of directly on the public server. By using the staging and mirroring features of EPiServer CMS, content is pushed to the delivery environment. Deployment in EPiServer CMS involves the distribution of content and code packages between the development and production environments.

How to run a successful web development project lead to many questions to consider, both for customers, project managers and developers. It is a common practice to develop a site running on a development server and then to deploy it onto a test server, and after a successful test, to deploy the website on the live production web server.

• What preparations are needed, which decisions must be taken?
• What technical aspects must be considered during development, how to build content and how is the acceptance testing done?
• Migrate content from an existing website, or create new from scratch?
• Which features will be implemented on the website, which in turn will affect development and configuration?

Considerations for the Deployment Environment

The deployment environment can be divided into the following parts:

• Development is the local environment where developers in the project team create code and do their unit tests.
• Integration is the shared code repository where builds are done before deploying to the test environment.
• Test (Quality Assurance QA) is the environment where the acceptance test is carried out. Resembles the delivery environment as much as possible.
• Deployment is the testing environment is deployed into production.
• Content Management is the area where the actual content production is carried out, often on separate servers behind a firewall.
• Content Delivery is the public environment where the visitor accesses the content, the servers are often load balanced for availability reasons.

Considerations for the Development Environment

Setting up a development environment is quick and easy using the EPiServer Deployment Center. You can choose between an express installation or a custom installation. The platform is delivered with an optional set of page templates. From the download files, you will be creating a new website and setting up a database, together with a Visual Studio project folder and a file share.

Choosing a Development Strategy

The way you set up your development environment can influence the way you build and deploy your EPiServer solution. For example, if your production website will be running a web server with IIS7 it may well be suitable to create a website in EPiServer Deployment Center.

The way you deploy your solution could well be influenced by how you set up the initial development environment. For example, if you are not using IIS as a part of your deployment environment you may need to maintain a separate web.config for your development and production environments.