Magento Development Environment

At such a project we are working right now, a very big project with over 100 custom Magento modules.

Beside the new modules, we also develop various tools to automate stuff.

One of the biggest challenges is making sure that every tiny thing we develop would work out of the box on our VM, the staging environment and of course when we deploy it on the live servers.

You guessed it, we build our own.

Well… we need a multi-dimensional array with IDs from which we need to copy the products for each environment (Virtual Machine, Stage, Live)

After much debating with the Innobyte team, we decided to write a custom Magento module so we can use it in more modules. We also decided to hack the index.php a little so we can do some checks (if needed) before everything is loaded-up.

Part 1 – Hacking

In index.php we have the following code :

/* START DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT */
$allowEnvs = array( 'live', 'stage', 'dev' );

$defaultEnv = 'live';

if ( isset($_SERVER['DEV_ENV']) && in_array( trim($_SERVER['DEV_ENV']), $allowEnvs) ) {
$env = trim($_SERVER['DEV_ENV']);
}
else {
if ( PHP_SAPI == 'cli' ) {
$env = 'cli';
}
else {
$search = array(
'dev' => array( 'dev.', 'devel.', 'test.'),
'stage' => array( 'stage.', 'staging.'),
'live' => array( 'www.' )
);
$found = false;
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$parts = explode('.', $host);
foreach ( $parts as $part ) {
foreach ( $search as $dev => $bits ) {
if ( in_array($part.'.', $bits) ) {
$found = true;
$env = $dev;
}
}
}
if ( !$found ) {
$env = $defaultEnv;
}
}
}
define('DEV_ENV', $env );
/* END DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT */
[/php]

As you can see, this is done before any other thing being loaded.

It first checks if there is a SetEnv directive in .htaccess. If there is any and it is in the allowed array (prevent typos) it skips to the section where we define our constant.

If not, the code checks the HTTP_HOST and sets the variable based on it.

If no match is found, it sets the default environment (live, in our case).

Part 2 – the Magento Module

We created a new module in the Innobyte namespace, called Base.

We are going to place the code here so we can reuse it everywhere we need to by simply calling a Helper.

Just create the file Innobyte_Base.xml in the app/etc/modules dir with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<modules>
<Innobyte_Base>
<active>true</active>
<codePool>local</codePool>
</Innobyte_Base>
</modules>
</config>

This tells Magento to load our module.

Next, create the following directory structure:

app/code/local/Innobyte

app/code/local/Innobyte/Base

app/code/local/Innobyte/Base/Helper

app/code/local/Innobyte/Base/etc

We just have one method  in it and it .

We send it an array with all values for all environments and it returns the one for the current environment. Pretty simple.

Just create a new file called Data.php in the app/code/local/Innobyte/Base dir and paste the code:

<?php
class Innobyte_Base_Helper_Data extends Mage_Core_Helper_Data {
public function getValues ( $input ) {
$allowEnvs = array( 'live', 'stage', 'dev', 'cli' );

if ( PHP_SAPI === 'cli' ) {
define('DEV_ENV', 'cli');
}

if ( !defined( 'DEV_ENV' ) || !in_array( DEV_ENV, $allowEnvs )  ) {
return false;
}
else {
if ( !array_key_exists( DEV_ENV, $input ) ) {
return false;
}
return $input[ DEV_ENV ];
}
}
}
[/php]

After that it checks if the constant is defined it is one of the one that we need ( $allowEnvs array ). It then returns as the array we need based on the keys of the input array.

An input array would look like:

‘dev’ => array ( 1, 2, 3 ) // array of ids for dev env

‘stage’ => array( 1, 2, 5) // values for stage

‘live’ => array( 1, 7, 14) // values for live

);
[/php]

Assuming that we would use this on our dev environment, calling:

would print out the first array (  1, 2, 3 );

If there were any problems, we would have to modify that file again with the first values for our VM and do the whole process all over again.