Migrating changes Dev -> Prod

[cbcoutinho]

Hello,

I've been asked to assist a team in deploying an EspoCRM application into a cloud environment. I'm a fairly competent developer and have extensive experience deploying containerized applications, but EspoCRM is rather new for me and I'm looking to the community for help.

Our team would like to restrict development to a single "dev" instance of EspoCRM, and automate the synchronization to our "prod" instance. Does EspoCRM support a deployment scenario where users are not expected to duplicate their changes across instances?

From my own investigation, it appears that all (meta)data is stored in a single MySQL database; however, it's not clear to me how one could migrate the "dev" model/schema changes to "prod" without also copying all of the data over as well.

Thanks,
Chris

PS: This is repost of the following post as I don't believe this functionality exists but I think it's a beneficial feature to have

https://forum.espocrm.com/forum/installation-and-upgrade-help/82639-migrating-changes-dev-prod

[AgentT]

The "metadata" in the DB is build on building the entityDefs files where the schema is defined. So you package these files and install them as extensions. So when you install this extension in a new environment, the appropriate columns/indexes/relations are added to the database.

[yuri]

All changes made through admin UI are stored in metadata files in the `custom` directory. You can sync the whole folder from dev to prod. And run rebuild after syncing.

[dimyy]

Not all.
Roles, groups, layout Sets, business processes (advanced pack) stored in the DB.
General menu and some other things stored in the config.php

You can make all your customization as modules with some before/after install code.
This somewhat lengthens the development but makes all customizations more structured and allows subsequent automatic deployment.