Installing Multiple Rainbows the Smart way.
A couple of years back I was giving a class on Rainbow to a group of 12 or so students. Back then as it is now, it's a *** to install multiple Rainbows.
I looked at the install scripts and realized that the basic steps were really easy and the only variables that really mattered for me were directory names, usernames, passwords, and database names.
Here were my steps.
[CreateDatabaseAndUser]
Using simple T-SQL. I got most of this from the install.sql in the Rainbow setup.
1. Create Database
2. Create Database User
3. Set Database User Password
4. Change Database Ownership to User
[CopyFiles]
This step takes the longest because I was giving each student their own directory with their own source code base.
1. Create SiteDirectory under DomainDirectory
2. Copy latest plain Rainbow codebase from CodeRoot to SiteDirectory
3. Open template web.config.tpl from CodeRoot, search and replace DB settings, copy as web.config to SiteDirectory
[InstallApplication]
I did this manually, but I have some code somewhere that given the IIS instance name and the directory name, it can make folders into applications.
One thing that I discovered today .. thanks to
Sahil's command line tricks post, is "pushd" and "popd" command line tools which I should have learned a LONG time ago. This will help me a lot since deployment of initial rainbows is only part of the over all process. Pretty soon, certain customers will ask for upgrades, and they only need _some_ of their directories updated with code. I see a lot of directory changing in those upgrade programs and pushd/popd will be very beneficial.