How should the development environment be?

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I've just started a new job as a developer for a site that uses EPiServer.

No one else at the company knows EPiServer and I've never developed with EPiServer either so I'm in the dark here.

My question is how should the development process work?

If I've understood it correctly, you install EPiServer CMS on a server and that's where you develop the site as well?

The workflow here at the company seems to be to checkout the source code locally from a repository, code something, check it in again and then remote to the server to do a checkout there and update the code.

I have right now no ability to locally run the EPiServer site and test the code I'm writing before pushing it back to the repository and update the code on the server.

This feels very wrong.

#73950
Aug 15, 2013 8:08
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Hi,

I run Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2012 on my dev computer. I have installed IIS, SQL Server Express and EPiServer CMS 6 and 7 on my computer.

When developing I test locally through IIS, but you can use Visual Studio Development Server (right click project -> Properties -> Web). Works just like any other ASP.NET project, really.

#73955
Aug 15, 2013 11:09
Vote:
 

Get latest, code something, checkin and cross-finger that evcerything will work as expected really seems like wrong workflow :)

I would say that you really have to setup local dev env in order to try things out, play around and be confident that things are working as expected *before* committing those back to to source code repository.

To launch CMS site locally you will need a EPiServer installation locally and license files as well. Depending on your project settings and overall development practices, you may probably will need to add reference to EPiServer nuget feed (http://nuget.episerver.com) to get / install packages, you can run sites under IIS (better to create site there with appropriate address as mentioned in .csproj file) or IIS Express, also as Thomas mentioned local SQL server would be the best.

Depending on EPiServer version you may also need to get VPP folder content (v7) to successfully load required modules.

#74019
Aug 17, 2013 22:42
Vote:
 

Here is my setup:

Developer machine:

  • install episerver on local machine, this will place episerver dll-s in GAC, episerver admin-mode-files in c:\programfiles\episerver, and visual studio templates (?)
  • episerver developer license
  • I always copy episerver.dll etc. local to my project (overrides gac, can have multiple versions of episerver/projects on same machine). Or use nuget.
  • visual studio 2012. I use cassini wich works ok (not perfect)
  • ms sql management studio

 

Database server:

  • database for test/dev. I don't use a local database since we often work in a team on the same project and need to be in sync with database/VPP

 

Fileserver:

  • Network-share for VPP. Needs to be in the same domain as your dev-computer

 

Buildserver (higly recommended!):

  • Install Teamcity or another buildserver. The buildserver is responsible for deploying new versions to live or test servers. We use automatical deployment to test, and manual deployment to live.

 

webserver (test/live)

  • iis, configure for automatic deployment, create empty site
  • episerver
  • episerver license

 

#74132
Edited, Aug 21, 2013 12:45
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