Deployment

Deploying your PHP application on our hosting accounts can be done hassle free with the use of symlinks (symbolic links) to the relevant folders. This can be as simple as pointing ~/httpdocs to your webroot folder or more complex setups for deployment applications. 

To create a symlink you can use the following command.

ln -s /home/$USER/[File/Folder location] /home/$USER/[symlink location]

This will create a symbolic link at symlink location pointing to File/Folder location. 

Examples

Here are some examples using Magento 2 

Simple and Direct approach.

Symlinking the httpdocs folder to the webroot folder of magento 2

# Magento root folder.
~/magento2

# symlink httpdocs to the Magento pub folder.
~/httpdocs -> ~/magento2/pub

CI deployment

Symlinks really shine when it comes to CI deployment.
This is an example of a Magento 2 setup ready for CI. 

# Magento 2 root folder for the current release
~/releases/202608031523

# Shared folder for files not in Git
~/shared

# The symlinks for files not in the Git Repo.
~/releases/202608031523/pub/robots.txt -> ~/shared/pub/robots.txt
~/releases/202608031523/pub/media -> ~/shared/pub/media
~/releases/202608031523/var -> ~/shared/var

# Symlink to the current release for easy access
~/current -> ~/releases/202608031523

# Symlink to the webroot using the current symlink.
~/httpdocs -> ~/current/pub

# Symlink from the default magento2 installation folder to the current release.
~/magento2 -> ~/current

With this setup, the only symlink that needs to be changed after a new release is ~/current
and most deployment tools will take care of this for you.

After a Release

After a release you may need to flush the various caches. 

PHP OPcache

OPcache is enabled on the servers we manage. If you change a file, PHP will detect the change and re-read the code from disk. If you switch to a new release using a symlink, PHP will not detect any changes and keep using the old code. You can fix this by flushing the OPcache

Varnish

We do not recommend cleaning Varnish after every deploy. This will cause your shop to become unnecessarily slow after a release. You can flush Varnish manually. Read here how to manage Varnish

Other Caches

You may need to clean application caches after a release, depending on the changes you make. If your application cache is in Redis, read here how to manage Redis