Hotfixing an Site Factory deployment¶

Sometimes, code updates that are deployed to your production Site Factory websites may contain one or more problems. Instead of waiting for the code update to complete across all websites in your platform—and potentially cause multiple websites to become nonfunctional—you can pause the code update process and send a hotfix to immediately address the issue.

If you realize that you need to immediately address a problem in a code update by deploying a hotfix, complete the following steps:

1. Pause the code update deployment process.

2. Develop a hotfix that resolves the issue (or issues) you discovered in your previously running code update.

   Note

   If your hotfix uses Drush commands that affect a single website, be sure to use the --uri=site.host.com parameter for the commands, where site.host.com is your website’s complete site and domain name.

3. Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console using an account with the release engineer role.

4. In the admin menu, click Administration, and then click the Update code link to open the Site update page.

5. In the Update in progress section, click Pause.

6. Create a tag for your updated hotfix code using the procedures in the Preparing for the code deployment section of Performing a production deployment.

7. On the Site update page, in the Scheduled start time section, select from the following options to control when Site Factory will start the hotfix process:

   • Immediately - Starts the code update process when you click Update.
   • Date string field - Starts the code update process at a specific time. Enter a time using the strtotime format, which can include specific or relative values. Here are some examples:
     • Date and time: Mon Feb 24 13:28:38 2016 - 13:28:38 GMT on February 24, 2016
     • Unix timestamp: @1456321108 - 13:38:28 GMT on February 24, 2016
     • Relative time: 5 hours - Five hours from the current time

8. In the Sites: VCS tag list, click the tag for the hotfix.

9. Click Update.

The hotfix update is applied to the websites that were already updated by the code update process, and is then applied to the code update itself.

After the hotfix is complete, the previously started code update process resumes, deploying the hotfix to the remaining websites.