Enabling Local Live Staging

Staging allows changes to be made in a staging environment so that work can be reviewed, possibly using a workflow, before it’s published to a live site. With Local Live staging, both your staging environment and your live environment are hosted on the same server. When Local Live staging is enabled for a site, a clone of the site is created containing copies of all of the site’s existing pages. Typically, this means the staging and live environments share the same JVM, database, portlet data (depending on which portlets are selected when staging is enabled), and setup configurations, such as the properties set in the portal-ext.properties file. The cloned site becomes the staging environment and the original site becomes the live environment.

Site administrators can enable local staging for a site by navigating to the *Publishing → Staging menu. To get some hands-on experience with enabling Local Live staging, you can complete a brief example which creates a Local Live staging environment for your site.

1. Navigate to the Product Menu (left side) and select Publishing → Staging.

2. Select Local Live. You also have the option to enable page versioning and select staged content.

   You can enable page versioning on a site’s public pages, private pages, both, or neither. Page versioning allows you to work in parallel on different versions of pages and maintains a history of all page modifications. You can also choose content for the staging environment to manage on the Staging Configuration page. You can learn more about these options in the Enabling Page Versioning and Staged Content article.

3. Click Save.

You’ve officially begun the staging process!

Because Local Live staging creates a clone of your site, it’s recommended to only activate staging on new, clean sites. Having a few pages and some apps (like those of the example site you created) is no big deal. If you’ve already created a large amount of content, however, enabling staging can take a lot of time since it’s a resource intensive operation. Also, if you intend to use page versioning to track the history of updates to your site, it’s recommended that you enable it as early as possible, before your site has many pages and lots of content. Your site’s update history won’t be saved until you enable page versioning. Page versioning requires staging (either Local Live or Remote Live) to be enabled.

If you ever need to turn off the staging environment, return back to Staging from the Publishing dropdown. The processes you’ve created are displayed by default. Navigate to the Options icon () from the upper right corner of the page and select Staging Configuration. Select the None radio button to turn Local Live staging off. Please note that this operation removes the staging environment altogether, so all content that was not published to your live site will be lost!

Great! Now you’re ready to use Local Live Staging.