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Environment Specific Configurations

This section explains how to configure projects depending on the environment where they are deployed, this is useful for managing values such as paths or database connections without the need to change any code directly in the servers.

Using Project Configuration Files

This is the preferred way to manage configurations because changes only require to publish the files from Crafter Studio to take effect.

The perfect example is how to manage a database connection that will change depending on the server where the project is deployed: for example the address, name or port of the database could change for the staging and production servers. Crafter Engine provides a feature to easily include the configurations for all environments in the project repository.

Note

In order to use this feature all Crafter Engine servers need to set a proper value for the crafter.engine.environment property.

For this example assume the following values:

Server	Environment	Configuration Files
Local Development	dev	/config/engine/dev-site-config.xml /config/engine/dev-application-context.xml
Authoring	auth	/config/engine/auth-site-config.xml /config/engine/auth-application-context.xml
Delivery	delivery	/config/engine/delivery-site-config.xml /config/engine/delivery-application-context.xml

In this case the developers can include the appropriate connection string for each environment and Crafter Engine will read the right file:

Local Development Configuration: /config/engine/dev-site-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site>
  <db>
    <uri>mongodb://localhost:27017/mydb?maxPoolSize=1&amp;minPoolSize=0&amp;maxIdleTimeMS=10000</uri>
  </db>
</site>

Authoring Configuration: /config/engine/auth-site-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site>
  <db>
    <uri>mongodb://localhost:27020/mydb?maxPoolSize=5&amp;minPoolSize=2&amp;maxIdleTimeMS=10000</uri>
  </db>
</site>

Delivery Configuration: /config/engine/delivery-site-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site>
  <db>
    <uri>mongodb://delivery-db-server:27020/delivery-db?maxPoolSize=10&amp;minPoolSize=5&amp;maxIdleTimeMS=1000</uri>
  </db>
</site>

When using this approach the code is completely independent of the environment so we only need one bean that will always connect to the right database:

Default Application Context: /config/engine/application-context.xml (shared by all environments)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">

  <bean class="org.springframework.context.support.PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer" parent="crafter.properties"/>

  <bean id="mongoUri" class="com.mongodb.MongoClientURI">
    <constructor-arg value="${db.uri}"/>
  </bean>

  <bean id="mongoClient" class="com.gmongo.GMongoClient">
    <constructor-arg ref="mongoUri"/>
  </bean>

</beans>

Using Server Configuration Files

This option is less flexible than using the project configuration files because any change will require a server restart to take effect.

Crafter Engine allows to override project configuration using files outside of the repository, usually these will be managed by the system administrator instead of the developers and will add some complexity to the setup process and keeping all environments updated.

Project Configuration

For each project you can provide an external set of configuration files in the shared folder of the application server:

TOMCAT/shared/classes/crafter/engine/extension/sites/{siteName}/site-config.xml TOMCAT/shared/classes/crafter/engine/extension/sites/{siteName}/application-context.xml

Global Configuration

One last option is to include your property as part of the global Crafter Engine configuration, the only advantage of this approach is that the property will be available to all projects and the value doesn’t need to be repeated if it is needed by more than one project.

TOMCAT/shared/classes/crafter/engine/extension/server-config.properties

Crafter Engine Global Configuration (shared by all projects deployed in the server)

db.uri=mongodb://delivery-db:27020/deliverydb?maxPoolSize=10&minPoolSize=5&maxIdleTimeMS=1000