CiviCRM upgrade oddities: the sandbox site

CiviCRM's upgrade documentation instructs you to test your upgrade first on a copy of the live site, and only after that to actually upgrade the live site.

Why is this an oddity?

Your average non-technical site owner will not be able to create a working copy of their live site without professional help.

So is this a step you can skip?

I'll admit, I often skip it. But I've been doing CiviCRM upgrades for 15 years.

For your first several times applying a CiviCRM upgrade, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you skip this step.

If you have a high risk tolerance, you might ignore that advice and skip this step anyway. That's fine. Just don't tell anyone I recommended it.

So how can you handle this oddity?

You have a couple of options:

1. Learn how to create a working copy of your live site. You may find a CiviCRM coach who can teach you how to do it. Or, you may enjoy learning this on your own.

2. Hire a developer to create a tool that will clone your live site to a working “sandbox” copy. This is a software development task, and perfectly suitable for outsourcing (because you don't care how they build it, you just care that it works whenever you need to use it).

Are there other reasons you would want to have a sandbox site?

Yes, there probably are.

A sandbox site is a place where you can test any number of things:

• CiviCRM upgrades

• CMS upgrades

• New configurations and features

• Mew content and designs

• Data imports

• Lots more …

If you try that stuff on your live site and it goes poorly, you may have some big headaches. But if that happens on your sandbox site, you can just throw it all away by rebuilding the sandbox site from the live site.

Your pre-upgrade homework:

If you’re interested in handling CiviCRM upgrades in-house, you’ll need to put some thought into this part of it.

Find out what it would take to build a sandbox copy of your life site. Can you do it yourself? Could you have developer automate it, so you can rebuild the sandbox site whenever you want?

To sum up:

Building a working “sandbox” copy of your live site is something you may never have thought of before. But the CiviCRM documentation recommends it for good reason. It's also nice to have for other things, not just CiviCRM upgrades.

All the best,
A.