Testing the site in a staging environment

Follow this procedure to test your site in a staging environment.

Procedure

  1. Copy data to the staging database, if your production environment is already running.
  2. Update and test the site in the staging environment.
  3. Publish data to the production database.
  4. Manually propagate any database schema changes from the staging database to the production database.
  5. Optional: Delete staged data from the STAGLOG table.

    Once data is published to the production database, entries in the STAGLOG table are marked as "published". These entries will not be published again. You might want to keep the information in the STAGLOG table for auditing or troubleshooting purposes.

    Delete staged data from the STAGLOG table if performance of the stagingprop utility is slow.

What to do next

Repeat steps 1 to 5 each time changes are made to the files or database data in the staging environment. These steps can be automated in a script and scheduled to run at off-peak hours to minimize performance impacts to the production environment.