TYPO3 Site Importer

Built on top of TYPO3 and TYPO3 Console.

Introduction

When it comes to deployment with TYPO3 projects, one tedious issue with TYPO3 is that certain configuration is stored within the database.

While TYPO3 is doing a better job over and over again, there are still some remaining issues left:

sys_domain

Domain records are the most problematic issues. On a multi-site project (multiple websites in one installation), it is very annoying to set up domain records over and over again, and keep them in sync. This little tool will help out to overcome this issue.

sys_template

Basic TypoScript information has to be still loaded from the database.

Since TYPO3 v8, there are good solutions such as the "bolt" extension, which does not need to have a sys_template record anymore.

One change of a single database field inside the page solves the issue for most of our projects.

sys_language

Most of our projects have a lot of langauges, however we add them to production first to ensure that all IDs are the same throughout the system.

Basic Usage

Our deployment setups use composer, .env and TYPO3 console. Deployment runs through ansible or deployer, or completely transparent via platform.sh.

For our needs, we need to add the domain records to all of our projects, depending on the environment, usually a local, testing, staging and production system.

In order to make use of the site importer, require this package via composer

composer req bmack/site-importer

After that, create a yaml file somewhere in your project repository. Our setups usually look like this:

bin/
conf/
web/
var/
vendor/
composer.json
composer.lock

In this case, create a file conf/site_dev.yaml for the local setup. It looks like this

domains:
  mode: "replace"
  table: "sys_domain"
  entries:
    - { domainName: "myproject.local", pid: 1 }
    - { domainName: "myproject-ch.local", pid: 1 }
    - { domainName: "myproject-microsite.local", pid: 13056 }

Other files for staging, production etc. can be created accordingly.

The option mode describes whether to truncate the database table before the entries are added. but could also be set to append or update. If set to append the entries will be written as pure insert without regard whether the record already exists.

If mode is set to replace the table is first truncated, then entries are inserted.

If mode is set to update the following happens:

• A check is made if the entry contains a uid property. If it does not, the entry is inserted as a new record (like it would happen if mode was set to append).
• If entry does contain a uid property, the script checks if the record exist in the table and if it does, an SQL update is done to update the record. If it does not exist, it is inserted.

The file accepts more than one table, thus, all language records could be added as well, however this could be done in a generic sites.yaml file which works for all environments.

When deploying, simply call bin/typo3cms siteimport:fromfile conf/site_dev.yaml to import the configured recordsets.

platform.sh

For platform.sh we use bin/typo3cms siteimport:fromfile conf/site_$PLATFORM_BRANCH.yaml in the post-deploy hook to replace the records for a specific branch.