As a Xibo newbie, I spend a fair amount of time experimenting with the incredibly feature rich Xibo system (CMS Cloud / Windows Player). So far, it has been ok since we are in learn/development/test/QA phase. However, we are about to take our first production display online ( April/2, April/1 avoided to prevent the launch announcement to the community we serve being deemed a prank).
Going forwards, we would like to isolate the development/test/QA environment from the production environment. Given the need to test updates (e.g. Xibo for Windows v2 R252 / CMS 2.3.2 - Currently on Xibo for Windows v2 R201 / CMS 2.3.1) and sandbox exploring features, what is the best practice to achieve this? (Possibly a new category - Best Practices?)
I anticipate the solution would be to buy a new CMS/Player license for the second environment. The dev and production environments can be on the same PC or separate PCs. There are separate displays available for the 2 environments, one each, expecting to expand production displays to 5 in near future.
First I’d suggest having a read of this post which explains Xibo’s versioning:
For patch releases, we recommend always running the latest patch. You can very easily roll back to an earlier patch release as needed as there are no database schema changes, so it’s just as simple as rolling back to the prior docker container. On Cloud we keep everyone at the latest patch for their minor version automatically.
For minor releases, we add new features and you may want to test those in a dev environment. A second CMS is the way to do that, either on Cloud or hosted locally at your preference. On Cloud by default we keep everyone at the latest minor version automatically, but you can opt out of minor version updates if you wish.
For major releases, we always recommend testing as there may be training implications for your users, Player upgrades etc. On Cloud we never upgrade a major version automatically, but you can do so with a single click.
So to answer your question, yes a second CMS and test Player is a great idea if you want a dev environment.
Thanks Alex.
That helps a lot. I think a second cloud CMS for dev with auto major version updates enabled and the existing cloud instance will be set to opt out of auto major version upgrade and used for production, is what I will recommend to the organization.