Migrating a site from Development to Production – VertiGIS Support

Overview:
This article summarizes the process of moving a site from your development environment to your production environment.

Your production environment can be on the same server as your development environment, or on a different server; the process is the same.
You should be using the same version of Essentials and the viewer on both environments.

Note: While you are working in your development environment, we strongly suggest you document all your custom configurations. That way, you can use your documentation as a guide during the migration process!

Solution:

Start by closing your site in Essentials Manager, using the close site button, on both the development and production server. We will be working directly with the configuration files, which won't change when the site is closed:

Navigate to the Essentials Sites folder in a File Explorer, and find the folder containing your site:

Note: In this example, we are using a named instance so the path includes the instance name (4.5.1). If you're not using a named instance, the path will be "Default".

Copy your site folder to a network share that is accessible to both servers. Alternatively, if you are using RDP to connect to your servers, you can copy and paste the folder from one server to another.

Note: It's best practice to save your workflows, reports, and print templates in the site folder. However, if you have them stored in a different location (for example a global Resources or Templates folder), you will want to make sure you also copy those to the same location on the Production server as well. If there are any other configurations beyond the above (i.e. images, dll’s, resources, icons) these must also be copied over to production.

Copy the site to your sites folder on the production server. If you are applying a new version of a site that already exists in production, consider making a backup of the currently working site first, in case something goes wrong and you need to roll back the changes. You may also want to remove old version(s) of a site from the sites folder if you have multiple versions of the same site because two sites with the same site ID will not load correctly in Manager. The site ID's are located in the Site.xml file if you need to check them.
Load Essentials Manager on the production server, and you should see the site in your sites list:

If you don't, check the Essentials and Essentials Manager logs for load errors.
At this point, you should launch your viewer to ensure that the site is functioning correctly. Make sure to explicitly test the following if they are configured on your site:

Workflows
Reports
Print Templates
Data Links and Data Connections

You may need to open the site in Manager, and reconfigure some of your map service URLs, and geoprocessing URLs if they are different between your development and production environments.
If you use ArcGIS authentication for Geocortex, you may see the following error the first time you try to load a Viewer after migration: "The current security policy for Geocortex Essentials does not allow any suitable sign in methods for this request." If so, follow the instructions in this article: Migrating Sites Between Instances with ArcGIS Authentication.

If you need assistance migrating your sites from development to production, please feel free to create a Support ticket.

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