Problem:
A major store structure change was to be done for a customer. These included creating new websites and stores as well as change of domain for existing ones.
There would be 6 stores and 8 websites active, though a total of 15 stores and 15 websites had to be created for future.
The challenge:
A typical go live plan would include taking a long downtime as the stores and websites were created manually on the production, with the domains added to core config data.
Apart from being slow, a manual change of this magnitude risked errors.
A requirement for testing was to be able to execute this multiple times and this too presented a challenge in terms of effectiveness of the test as well as the limited number of cycles this could be done.
luroConnect build merges the store structure from a custom named file “config.php.build” into the config.php. luroConnect deploy runs “bin/magento setup:upgrade –keep-generated” to ensure the store structure from config.php is deployed into a database. This allows developers the freedom to modify the store structure on their development system and once ready can dump the structure to an additional file and add that to git.
This plan was presented to Codilar and the developers accepted this as a valid plan and a test was performed to confirm.
The changes to domain were captured in app/etc/env.php.
Corresponding changes were made in the nginx configuration and redirects were setup in nginx for old domains and paths to new ones – using regular expressions.
Conclusion
A major multi store structure change was deployed on live with confidence and minimal downtime. Moreover, this being an automated process, it was possible to test the change multiple times.
The redirections in nginx helped in ensuring minimal SEO impact.
