Deploying TYPO3

Using Git and Composer on the webserver

• Check if Composer is available on the production server. If it is not available consider to use the latest composer.phar.
• Keep all development related files in a Git repository.
• Clone this repository on your production server.
• Copy the database to the production server.

• Install TYPO3 without dev dependencies on the production server:

  composer install --no-dev

  Copied!
• Compare the database
• Fix file permissions
• Clear caches

If you do a composer install directly on the production server you might experience some problems. For this reason some developers and administrators decide not to do it:

• There can be several minutes of downtime even if the installation goes smoothly.
• The installation might fail if some packages are not available.
• You might accidentally call composer update as is often done during development and do unintended, untested updates.
• You might omit the --no-dev option and accidentally install packages that are not save to be used during production.

Some of these problems can be fixed by using a symlink strategy where one directory is running on production and another one is being updated.

Build locally and copy all files and symlinks to the server

• Build the local environment (installing everything necessary for the website)
• Run composer install --no-dev to install without development dependencies
• Copy files to the production server
• Copy the database to the production server
• Compare the database
• Fix file permissions
• Clear caches

There can be several problems with this strategy:

• Copying files or unzipping files can be slow, there can be several minutes of downtime.
• A TYPO3 installation depends on symlinks. Make sure these symlinks are preserved during copying and or compressing files.

Automatic deployment

There are multiple tools that can be used to automate deployment. Read more about it: TYPO3 Explained, automatic deployment.