Deployment and Front End Development

[apiuser]

Feature request from Khaleel, posted on GitHub Aug 12, 2016

Hi

Where do I begin to vent my frustrations with this platform? Firstly I will bring to your attention this Stackoverflow bounty which no one from the Magento Community gave an answer for that I a hoping will garner here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38589283/a-faster-route-to-deploying-static-content-in-magento-2-...

1. Why is it that the Magento Team thought it was acceptable to turn a live website into Maintenance mode to carry out a deployment? Our company makes serious money and it is just - absurd - to consider ever placing our site in downtime (at any time or day).

We literally ship our code to git and then pull on the live server and then deploy static content and this takes an incredible amount of time. Just this week, our developers made a few mistakes and we had to re-deploy twice. 45 mins of no sales. Clearly this is not a solution. There must be something were not doing correctly; but your own documentation, recommends it.

1. @alankent who says 'I am not a frontend dev' Clearly not. Otherwise you would have chosen Sass and dropped the insane idea of Magento UI, which no one really knows what it is. And then further you would have scrapped RequireJS and all the insane (not SEO friendly) KnockoutJS bloat even on the cart. Please can you answer regarding this. It is been raised across the web on many threads on Stackoverflow which my bounty failed and even on this post: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/2104 other devs see the insane feature of this.

Why is it sooooo slow to make changes to Less and JS even in a developer mode node. You have to recompile files (no Livereload; which I get people not a fan of) but seriously? Make a padding or margin change; delete all var folders, re compile static files for all languages and then run grunt to generate less etc - seriously? ALL our Front End Engineers are strong with JavaScript and CSS and most are (including me) previously Back End Developers. It is insane.

Please can this be addressed? Gulp and Grunt is one argument but the process of static deploy on development mode is one thing - a live environment? Seriously?

[apiuser]

Comment from Khaleel, posted on GitHub Aug 16, 2016

@stamster another thing I have noticed is that Magento are outsourcing a lot of European developers where English is not their main language. You often find with these developers that they are primarily solid Back End driven and have a focus of over engineering a product. Not sure why less and less American eBay developers are on the table any more.

If they had the years of experience working with actual ecommerce companies and working within commercial environments they would have foreseen more commercial based objectives. Again "closed mindset"

Still not official response. I have seen plugins and capistro and all the other tools and solutions but this still does not answer why or who placed the idea to turn a live website offline to apply changes.

[apiuser]

Comment from Zaylril, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

@Khaleel In terms of the CSS, we have just taken to creating our own base theme fully in SASS and written our own tooling in Gulp. I'd also take a look here: https://github.com/SnowdogApps/magento2-frontools

They are working with Magento to convert M2 back into SASS and gulp.

[apiuser]

Comment from Khaleel, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

@Zaylril thanks for the reply @andimov thanks for tagging.

@Zaylril the tools sound and look good. Is that a rumour or is it official that Magento 2 will go to into SASS and Gulp?

[apiuser]

Comment from Zaylril, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

@Khaleel Yes it was confirmed a couple of months ago - please see https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/1337

However I'm not sure about the Gulp side of things - i'm pretty sure the new tooling will be in Gulp though.

[apiuser]

Comment from stamster, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

That is probably for 3.0 version or similar major version. 2.0.x and 2.1.x are too late for such a change IMHO.

[apiuser]

Comment from hostep, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

I don't see why switching from less to sass or grunt to gulp will improve the frontend developer performance problems. Since they are basically the same things. It's not the tooling which is the problem, but how Magento is using the tools I think.

[apiuser]

Comment from Khaleel, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

@stamster @Zaylril @hostep Aside from the development issues the deployment one is the biggest one.

A real life example of loosing clients. A UK ecommerce company we know currently 1.9 EE and are turning over $2-$3 million dollars per day.

When discussing a consultation on M2 and discussing deployment - just by the mention of downtime the client showed no interest in upgrading nor using the services. They actually have made extensive changes to core Magento and are very, very well known both in the retail and the development and Magento world; they could not fathom any downtime. Whatsoever. Ever. Period. They have no plans to upgrade.

Clients this big face commercial issues: M2 or DemandWare and things platforms like IBM WebSphere Commerce, Hybris, ATG etc

[apiuser]

Comment from Igloczek, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

IMO there is one way to deploy M2 to production - have a middle step (CI/CD) in deployment pipeline, to run every necessary compilation and test steps, then save results as ZIP for future use.

Then you can take this ready to use code on production server (i.e. via Capistrano) and enable 1-2 min maintenance mode just for database updates (probably setup:upgrade will be enough)

@Zaylril @Khaleel Officially we as a Snowdog are leading community project moving M2 to SASS, but... It's kinda hard to push execution of this idea forward. Everybody have different needs, no one can really write down their point of view and possible solution (including myself), that's why this project is stuck in middle of nowhere 👎

I was talking about this project on #mm16de - YouTube - Slideshare

If you have any solid ideas to rebuild some parts related to styling / tooling and they may fit almost everybody (solutions providers and extension developers - I leave non-tech clients out of the target) just let me know, maybe together we can build something useful.

BTW. To be honest I'm even thinking about moving front-end out of Magento, build everything on top of bigger MV* JS framework and thread M2 just as an API provider.

[apiuser]

Comment from hostep, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

Regarding the deployment issues, @piotrekkaminski & @xcomSteveJohnson & @choukalos: maybe you can ask your colleagues of the 'Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition' how they go about and do this? Are they for example able to upgrade the Magento version without any downtime? If yes: it would be great if this can be shared with the community about how we can accomplish this. Just an idea...

[apiuser]

Comment from Khaleel, posted on GitHub Aug 17, 2016

cc @alankent