Magento: Sync database between staging and production

Question

I have two instances of Magento, a production site and a staging site, both have there own codebase and mysql databases.

We have been making some changes to the staging site, specifically we have installed the aheadworks - payments and subscriptions module which has been configured.

We need to sync all the products from the production site to the staging site, then we will need to make our changes to the products so they are configured to work with the aheadworks - payments and subscriptions module and finally upload everything back to the production site without wiping out any new customers/orders that have been added to the production site while we have been making our changes.

Could anyone please explain how we could achieve this ?

Thanks

Steven

Answer 1

I suggest first copying the entire live database into your staging environment. That way, you have the most recent (live) data to work with on staging. After that, do some testing of the newly installed module on staging. Implement any template and code changes needed and test if the required features are working (for one product). Once everything works as expected, install the module on live, configure it there and start using it there.

So try to do most of the database / admin changes on live only, and use the staging environment just for testing if the module does what you need. That way, you avoid having to do complicated synchronisation of the database as well as having to do the same thing twice. Synching the databases can easily lead to problems like duplicate order IDs, and it's a lot of meticulous work which I would try to avoid. After all the products are changed on live, you could copy over the whole database to staging again, to sync afterwards. That's a lot less risky and meticulous. Hope this helps.