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 xcomSteveJohnson, posted on GitHub Aug 22, 2016

@hostep Regarding this comment:

• What are all the caches for?

  Does that make it clear which ones to disable?

• Which directories do you clear and when?

[apiuser]

Comment from hostep, posted on GitHub Aug 22, 2016

Hi @xcomSteveJohnson

Those pages looks really useful! I have to admit, I didn't properly research to see if the topics I mentioned were actually missing. I wrongly thought that particular information wasn't in the devdocs yet, because it has been a few months since I went through them in depth (hence my request for a changelog of the devdocs).

Anyway, the caches explanation is very useful, especially with those recommendations about when and if you should flush a particular cache type (although some types - reflection, translate, config_integration_api and config_webservice) don't have that recommendation right now). Is there btw a difference when working in development mode and working in production mode about certain caches being automatically flushed (or not used)? If that is the case, that would also help if this was documented.

I would still like some kind of recommendation for different types of developers. So frontend developers (in my opinion) should probably best disable these types of cache while doing development: block_html, layout, full_page, translate. If you guys think this is useful, you should probably add it somewhere in the Frontend Developer Guide section in a new Setting up your local environment topic or something like that. This is just an idea, please consult with other people if this is useful or not.

While that other page you link to about clearing certain directories is more geared towards PHP developers. And that page is also really useful, nice to find this page, first time I see this, was definitely an interesting read!

Keep up the good work!

[baldwin_pieter]

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[Anton_Kril]

Khaleel, can you please clarify this statement:

---

@apiuser wrote:

None of the developers have less compilation working. Even in developer mode the LESS files do not compile automatically even with Magento 2 admin setup

Less compilation should work in developer mode. Actually you should not run "setup:static-content:deploy" in developer mode at all. This command is there only for production.

In Grunt workflow, css files are automatically recompiled.

Also, why do you run "grunt less" on production? It's not needed after "setup:static-content:deploy" is run.

[travisdetert]

So is there an official statement from Magento about why this process is so insanely slow?  Are there any plans to address this?  There is no way our enterprise clients are going to consider this as they already have a percieved problem with speed and magento as it is.  Complicating the deployment process like this doesn't seem justifiable.  My experiences with deploying 10 themes was that it took nearly three hours to complete.  Magento 1 runs reasonably well on the exact same hardware.  

[lstramaccia]

the only solution would be to drop this frontend from magento

i don't think there is a feature that i would save.

[chhola]

whats the drawback if we drop the frontend and just use theirs api and build our own front end? as frontend developers?

[ripen_sbuchanan]

@chhola, I'm a long-time M1 developer relatively new to M2, but traditionally the issue was that not all functionality was exposed via APIs. I understand that is improved under M2, but I doubt sufficiently so as to be able to use all M2 backend features if you drop the built-in front end. You'd also be left needing to build your own caching layers since the standard view-layer and full-page caches wouldn't apply.

[vesan]

Hi,

Didn't managed to read all the comment but I totally agree that such standard deployments work-flow is unprofessional and unacceptable so must be fixed.

Maybe Magento team need more specific proposal like:

To avoid maintenance during deployment could you perform any compilation in 2 steps:

    1) Generate files into temporary folder

    2) Apply compilation result quickly when everything is finished

[andyjv]

Is there any updates on this? Its already been too long, and frankly, the Magento team should be embarassed for this.