Create staging environments for Joomla

Hi Mike, Tim Davis here helping with support.

You are correct — on the StageIt page the icon shows J6(BC), but StageIt is also Joomla 6 native. If you've purchased StageIt, you'll have access to the Joomla 3, Joomla 4, Joomla 5, and Joomla 6 versions, all native for each version.

Thanks for pointing this out — I'll make sure to get that icon updated later this week.

Reply to Josh Severse

Good morning Josh

Thank you for your message. User Permissions were added in version 2.1.3, released on 22nd May - if you download the latest version you can then set permissions in System > Global Config > Permissions > StageIt.

All the best! Barnaby

Reply to Cor Visser-Marchant

Good morning Cor,

Thank you for your message and very kind words!

The tables you need to exclude will depend on your system. You'll find that in StageIt Enterprise, the tables you can exclude are grouped by extension, so it's a case of checking through per extension, to see which ones might be continually updated on the frontend. With community, that would probably mean the Joomla Users tables, as well as most Community tables.

If you also ensure backups are enabled, then if you *do* need to restore a backup for any reason, then one will be available. Just also make sure there's plenty of space for the backup to be built and you'll be fine.

I hope that helps! Sincerely, Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Herco Terweij

Hi there Herco

Thank you for your message.

With StageIt Enterprise you can select which content and data you want to sync. The default is to sync everything - all files / folders and data, but you can exclude specific data tables or specific folders from the sync if needed, so you don't overwrite data and files on the live site.

I hope that helps?

Sincerely - Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Duksh

Hello Duksh,

Thanks for your message. StageIt and all my other extensions are constantly updated... I'll have to update the JED

Yes it's Joomla 3.9.1 compatible.

Hope that helps! Barnaby

Reply to Mikki

Hi Mikki,

Your name is awesome!

1 - yes feel free to use it on all your sites

2 - yes, and in fact it's already tested with Joomla 4 beta and works perfectly We'll be upgrading as new Joomla versions are released.

Best regards, Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Keith

Hi Keith,

The sync completely replicates the live environment with what is present on the staging environment.

To exclude specific data tables or folders (say in an ecommerce extension) you need the Enterprise version. You can then specify that any data that is regularly updated on the frontend is specifically excluded from any sync.

Kind regards

Reply to Alberto Aidala

Hi Jens & Alberto,

The operation is being blocked by your PHP open_basedir config. Please edit this so it allows the AJAX process to run, and it will work correctly

Regards, Barnaby

Reply to Sima

I am running nginx. Should I still enable .htaccess?

Reply to Sima

I just discovered that when I disable the Search Engine Friendly URLs option in the Joomla global configuration that is solves the problem. Any idea what might be the issue? Or the staging environment cannot work with Search Engine Friendly URLs?

Reply to Kevin Babbage

Hi there!

If you open StageIt on the live admin, you can click the Rebuild button. This will reset your staging environment to an exact replica of your live environment.

Have a great day!

Reply to Morten hansen

Perfekt thank you for those answers :)

Reply to Morten hansen

Hi again,

StageIt was designed to work with a single (standard) Joomla system, rather than several - but it will work with MightySites, you just need to allow for the extra configuration files, which are not standard for Joomla.

As it's non-standard I can't directly support this use of StageIt & MightySites, but the below information should help

MightySites overrides the default configuration.php file, which is needed to run StageIt. So If you do want to run both together, you will need to make some manual changes as follows:

1. Run the StageIt deployment from the main Joomla site... then log into the Staging Environment, open the MightySites admin component, and Move all subsite data under stageit/ and update the configuration for each MightySites version of your site that you want to use.

2. edit /stageit/components/com_mightsites/configuration/configuration__com.php to ensure that the db_prefix is 'stg_xxxx' where xxxx is your original prefix

3. edit /stageit/components/com_mightsites/configuration/configuration__com_.php in the same way

4. Copy /stageit/components/com_mightsites/configuration/configuration__com.php to /stageit/.../configuration__stageit_com.php

5. Copy /stageit/components/com_mightsites/configuration/configuration__com_fusioncruise.php to /stageit/.../configuration__stageit__com.php

6. enter into the staging admin site and go to the mightytext component to update all database entries to use prefix stg_

7. When you Go Live, you need to do the reverse of these changes, so you update your live configuration_.php files to make the db_prefix just 'xxxx_' (your original prefix)

All the best, Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Kimball Willard

Good morning,

Great ! Thank you for the update, and I'm glad you were able to resolve this with the log information.

Have a great day

Reply to Kimball Willard

Hi again,

It could be a permissions issue, where the system isn't able to either read something in the live folder, or write to the staging environment folder.

It could also be where you have a folder with millions of files (such as logs), especially on a shared server since the system will struggle to load the folder contents into memory.

I've also see this happen where the system has a virus, which blocks the process. So worth checking some of your key files if they seem to have an infection of some kind - check index.php and configuration.php for example.

You could also check the log in /administrator/components/com_stageit/ to see if that gives a clue exactly where the process is failing...

If none of that helps, please send me a login and I'll check it out for you, as it seems to be a specific issue to your system.

Have a great day!

Reply to Kimball Willard

Good morning

A 500 error means your server isn't able to process something.

Often it means a memory limit, space limit, or CPU limit has been reached, and the server has timed out or prevented the process from running.

Reducing the deployment speed will help if it's a server resource limitation, although in some cases the server will still block you if it's a low budget shared option. But it's also worth checking available disk space.

In other cases, it'll mean an issue with the PHP environment, where a required function isn't available, this might happen for example if you are running a very old version of PHP, or if it's a custom install of PHP without standard functions available.

That will be resolved by ensuring PHP is up to date and appropriate for your version of Joomla, for example PHP 5.6 for Joomla 2.5, or PHP 7+ for Joomla 3+

Also it'd be helpful to note exactly where the issue happens, e.g. is it during database analysis, file and folder analysis, etc...

Hope that helps! Please reach out if you need further assistance, and if you'd like me to take a look email me separately with access.

Barnaby

Reply to Paul Aydelott

Hello,

StageIt is smart, intuitive and works well, and is specifically built for Joomla. Not comparable with other staging environments. None of the issues you've mentioned are an issue with StageIt.

Hope that helps

Reply to Carst

Hello,

Thank you for your message.

StageIt is an environmental staging extension, it'll exactly replicate your Live > Staged > Live environment, but it's not possible to take minor or granular changes and apply them individually.

Have a great day!

Reply to Prince Nitin

Hi there,

Thank you for your message.

The staging environment is always at /stageit/ , it's not possible to use a separate subdomain or different folder. It is created and managed automatically by StageIt

Regards

Reply to Petro

Hi Petro,

The Joomla system is complex and interdependent, so there aren't many changes that can be made without impacting the whole system due to internal UUIDs and the asset system.

It's not possible to make individual, granular changes such as pushing a single article edit to the live site. That would introduce too much potential for data inconsistency due to Joomla's internal asset system.

So with StageIt, it's by default an all-or-nothing system. You deploy the staging environment, which is an exact replica of the live system.

Then you make changes on the staging environment.

Then you push changes to live. It will check all files and folders for changes, as well as all data changes, and if it finds a change on either the live or the staging, it will push the staging version to the live site. This maintains data consistency.

With the enterprise version, you can opt to exclude specific files, folders and data tables from the sync. This is so that you can push staging to live, without impacting user-updated content (such as a sales system, a blog, user ratings etc).

It's not intended to exclude *everything except one folder*. That would again risk introducing inconsistencies.

You can make whatever changes you like on the staging system, and if you don't want to keep them, redeploy the live site > Staging, so that you revert the staging system to an exact replica of the live site.

StageIt is already Joomla 4 compliant, and has been for over a year

Kind regards, Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Paul d

Hi there

Thank you for your message. Joomla 4 will be a major change, so since it's not yet released it's impossible to say with certainty that StageIt will work perfectly. However, it's been developed to the latest available standards, so it should work - just can't guarantee just yet!

Have a great day

Reply to Paul Aydelott

Hi Paul

Thank you for your message. You can do this in a variety of ways.

The best way is through .htaccess - enable this on your staging environment, and exclude traffic except from your own IP address with the following code:

order deny,allow

deny from all

allow from <Your IP Address>

Note: the .htaccess is *not* deployed to live, so this change will not affect your live site during any sync.

Alternatively you can do this through staging environment Joomla admin - in System > Global Configuration > Site set the site to offline. This will require you to log in as an admin to see the site frontend.

Have a great day! Barnaby Dixon

Reply to Paul d.

Just to confirm, StageIt is now fully Joomla 4.x compatible.

Reply to Karen Dunne

Ok great. Do you use php 8 too? I have a site with php 8.0.13 and hope it work with latest php version there. I guess also next Jommla 4 version have support for php 8.1..

cheers!

Reply to Karen Dunne

Hi Karen and Barnaby hope this issue is fixed now with new release? I will also use StageIT with Joomla 4 and Helix Ultimate latest versions..

Cheers!

Reply to Ivan C

I tried your configuration and did not work. Any other ideas to try it out?

Thanks!

Reply to Marco

Hello Barnaby

thx for your fast answer :)

i saw i made a big mistake. I wrote /steageit/ in url instead of /stageit/ and copy/pasted this url the whole time. Didn't recognize this typo because also with this wrong url i landed on login site.

Now when i found this mistake and type the url the right way, it seems to work, together with the .htaccess thing.

Regards

Marco

Reply to Scott Pearson

Never mind, I disabled all Akeeba Backup plugins in staging and then pushed the changes to production. I was able to log into production. Next, I reinstalled the backup component in production, reenabled plugins, and then updated staging. Works fine now.

Reply to Scott Pearson

Hi Scott

That's an index issue, in the database (?) not sure which table. It'd be worth checking which index is throwing the error, if you check the database structure in PHPMyAdmin for that table, it will show indexes... you'd be looking for a compound unique index e.g. category_id & article_id . This won't be related to StageIt, which is entirely 'inert' while not being used, my guess is it's something in the database configuration.

Reply to David Phillips

Hi David,

Q1 - StageIt uses the subfolder /stageit/ , it doesn't work on a subdomain.

Q2 - Yes although it's not built for this - if you want a specific Joomla 4.x migration tool I'd suggest MigrateMe 4. This has many inbuilt tools and functions to ensure the migration is seamless, and offers additional backward checks to ensure the data structures are correct. There's also a 'safe-mode' function, so if you migrate and something goes wrong (e.g. a whitescreen is caused by an incompatible extension) use safe-mode to ensure you have a useable J4 environment, and you can then install the latest J4 version of the outdated extensions.

Best wishes - Barnaby

Reply to John Doe

Good morning John Doe

StageIt is a full site staging environment, it doesn't allow for selected items to be published or unpublished.

Best wishes

Reply to Niko Semaphore

Hello,

Yes this is by design - it won't create /yourrandomfolder for the staging environment - most additional third party folders that are actually *needed* will be in (say) /media , and this avoids copying /copyofbackup1 etc.

After the initial deployment, you usually won't need to redeploy the staging environment, so just copy any third party folder that you really do need manually to /stageit/

Then , make your changes in /stageit/yourfolder/ and any changes made will be copied BACK to the live folder when you sync with live.

The workflow is usually:

Live >> Deploy to Staging

Staging >> Make changes & test

Staging >> Sync changes to live

Staging >> Keep making changes and syncing to live

i.e. you don't normally need to redeploy the staging to the live.

So normally you also won't need to recreate your third party folder in the staging environment. The only time you *would* need to is if you've completely removed and rebuilt your staging environment, or if you've had changes in your live /randomfolder

Best wishes - Barnaby

Reply to ssnobben

OK thats a pity bcs this should be the solution for doing this https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/39879

Reply to ssnobben

Did you come any further with this feature suggestion? I think it would be very great and also if you can have another domain test site and then remotely also update the main domain site with one component and its dependencies..

cheers!

Reply to ssnobben

Good bcs now with latest bug of ACL who can configure that solve a great problem too :) https://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/39706

Reply to ssnobben

What would nice to have is if you could have set up different ”pre” stage copies for different devs access (with Joomla ACL) for different devs Joomla components.

So what that means is the each developer can only login to the site and only have access to their special StageIT area for their specific component.

When they then do testing and everything work they can push the update for the live site and then the only thing that is affected is there update for just their component.

Could that be a new feature enhancement for StageIT?

Reply to Rolf Winter

Hello

I have tried again. The StageIt plugin was not activated. Now it went completely over the stage. Sorry. . .

Reply to Erwan

Hi Erwin,

Since this is happening only some of the time there must be something that is happening only under certain circumstances.

When this happens are the log and cache paths also staying with their "stageit" paths entered?

Also, in the Stageit settings, do you have the "Force Refresh" setting set to "Yes - refresh and rebuild all files and data tables"?

I also wonder if some caching setup or tool you use is monkeying around with things when you push to live, but just typing that makes me wonder how that could be.

Keep me posted on what you try/find as this might help should anyone has this issue in the future.

Reply to Scott Pearson

Hi Scott,

In the configuration for StageIt, do you have "Force Refresh" set to "Yes"? If not, change that setting and try making a staging area again.

Regarding the version numbers, the latest StageIt package shows as 4.1 in the Joomla extension manager, but the component shows as 4.0.2. I will touch base Barnaby about making sure the Joomla Extension Directory info gets update. BTW, there have been no recent changes or updates that are related to this 200 error issue, so I don't think that is aversion issue.

Reply to Scott Pearson

Hi Scott - doesn't it seem like things always happen on the always the most important one! when you say the css is missing, is that in the back end only, the front end only, or both? If you can send some screenshots to supportphp-web-design.com (or even superuser login info and the url) I will take a look and see if I recognize the issue.

Reply to ssnobben

As we discuss before now the Joomla ACL fix is there for doing the concept of having other Joomla devs to your site.. see here https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/41262 will be subscriber again when this will be implemented and useful to have ACL access to different site Joomla devs on the site that can not interfere with other Joomla devs components.

Reply to ssnobben

Hi just made my own site getting toto know the rope

Reply to Scott Pearson

HI Scott,

I tested Stageit on a J5 site today and it worked fine, so I think you login issue might be something else.

Let's continue this conversation by email (supportphp-web-design.com) so you can share more specific things such as screeshots or logins to help you sort out what is going on.

God bless,

Tim

Reply to Pieter Vink

Hi Pieter,

Here is a video showing you how to remove MigrateMe 4 after you push your test migration to live:

https://cybersalt.com/migrateme-4/how-to-remove-your-joomla-4-test-migration-area-and-uninstall-migrateme-4

God bless,

tim

Reply to Agassi

Hi Agassi,

StageIt is now certified for Joomla! 5.

Have a great day!