Hi, not sure if this is right group to talk about this, if not maybe someone can suggest one?
Over the last few years I have built quite a few sites and it’s getting to the point that maintaining them all is taking too much time. The maintenance is becoming a bigger duty than building new sites.
So with the recent WP and Elementor updates, I’ve had more than a few errors on sites which have needed fixing.
Yes, I pull all sites over to staging before I update, however it takes time to do each. Is there an automated solution to this?
I know one developer who has a program where if the update shows any errors, it automatically rolls back to previous version and he receives an email notifying him of this.
Any insight on how to implement this or something similar (read: automated!) would be helpful. I use Siteground for hosting.
Thank you!
Answer:
This is part of CI/CD (continuous integration / continious deployment), where you setup a system to do 3 (or more) types of automated testing.
1. Code testing, if the coder made tests run them.
2. Visual regression testing. Use something like Wraith https://github.com/bbc/wraith to take a before and after picture of every page and check for differences. It will compare and tell you if one has changed beyond thresholds.
3. Automated user testing, using something like behat https://docs.behat.org/en/latest/ that runs user stories that test the functionality of a website. i.e. Can an Editor login and create a new post, Can a non logged in user create a comment.. etc etc
This is not an insignificant task to setup. #2 the visual testing is probably the easiest of the 3 to get working.
There are companies that offer some of this kinda thing i.e. https://applitools.com/
You’ll still need a pipeline, staging and production servers