On the ServerGrove.com blog today there's a new tutorial posted showing how to, using symfony and the Apostrophe CMS, create a full staging and live setup with different URLs for each.

This system allows you to make changes to a website and preview them before actually going live. It can be implemented with any website, we will show the necessary requirements and steps to implement with symfony and Apostrophe CMS, but you can also take parts of the tutorial and implement them without these applications. We have found this workflow suitable in a number of projects and wanted to share it.

The process can be modified to fit the needs of your symfony application (or really any app with enough tweaking) since it uses several "off the shelf" tools like Apache, PHP, symfony, Gearman and Supervisord. The sfSyncContentPlugin plugin is a bit more specific to Apostrophe, though. They walk you through the integration of all of the tools - starting up Gearman and Supervisord, making a worker and setting up your symfony configuration to have a "publish" route to set things in motion.

In a recent post to his blog Paul Reinheimer talks about a service (from WonderProxy) called Where's it Up? - a tool that can be used to see where in the world a site is up. He also outlines the technology behind it all.

The tool accepts a URL, and allows you to select global locations. It then attempts to connect to the given server and issue a HEAD request from the global locations you selected, and reports the results. [...] Building a reasonably robust application was trivial, thanks to being able to leverage the great technology built by others.

Tools that make up the application's stack include a Gearman server, curl, PHP with the pecl_http extension, memcached and supervisord. He details how they all fit together and why they built it in the first place.