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Welcome to the most important feature of trakked 2.0: Perform Contao updates right from within trakked!
The Contao Manager is a great piece of software, because it actually consists of two components: The visual graphical user interface (GUI) and the corresponding technical application programming interface (API).
This API is also the foundation for the communication with trakked. In other words, everything that the graphical Contao Manager interface can do, trakked may also use.
In our case, the current Contao update process looks something like this:
1. Check the Contao version and maintenance contract
Determine which customer is actually running which Contao version and whether they have a maintenance contract. In many cases, this still means a mixture of the current trakked version plus some Excel lists, which we update far too rarely (hey, sometimes you have to admit your own weaknesses to get better and we think you know exactly what we are talking about here).
2. Launch the Contao Manager
Once we have found the installation, we start the Contao Manager and look for the credentials, if we haven't already stored them in our password manager.
3. Perform a dry run
Since we would like to know whether the update would work at all or which packages would be installed, we first update the packages in a dry run. Then we wait for the result of the Composer Resolver Cloud, which indeed has become much faster with the latest changes, but well - we wait.
4. Check the result of the dry run
Normally, the dry run is successful. Then we extract the information about what updates would be made from the Composer output. This alone is sometimes a bit of a challenge, as Contao now consists of about 180 packages.
5 Performing the update
When we are satisfied with the dry run, we start the whole game again and let the Contao Manager do the update now. And we wait again.
6. Open the install tool
Finally, we open the install tool to perform potential database migrations and database schema updates such as new or deleted columns.
Repeat process for other installations
We then repeat this process 20 or 100 times, depending on the client portfolio, and at some point our workday is over and we feel like we haven't achieved anything productive all day. The regular Contao updates now take up a considerable amount of our working time, which we of course get paid for through corresponding maintenance contracts, but there must be room for improvement, right?
With trakked 2.0, we relieve ourselves of this torment and bring you the ultimate little helper to easily fulfil your maintenance contracts, so that you can get back to the interesting things as quickly as possible.
Our process has already changed significantly with trakked 2.0.
And it could soon look like this for you, too:
1. Open trakked and select installations
trakked makes it super easy to know which client is running on which Contao version and whether you have a maintenance contract for the respective installation is also a piece of cake thanks to its own labels. A central place for all information about the Contao installations of your customers for you and all employees of your organisation.
2. Prepare updates
You take your filtered list of installations and let trakked prepare the updates for all of them at once. For you, this means a maximum of four clicks. Afterwards, you may enjoy your coffee break or go to sleep, because trakked takes care of everything for you and prepares all updates in the background and keeps them ready for you until you have decided to perform or archive them.
3. Check and process updates
In trakked you can now easily check if an update is even possible and which packages and extensions would be updated at all. Whether you want to perform this immediately, after your coffee break, the next morning or after the weekend is completely up to you. You can see the version differences of the packages, which ones will be added and which ones will be deleted at a glance. If you think they are correct, you can then let trakked install one update after the other.
4. Open the install tool
After the installation, you can visit the install tool directly from trakked and execute the database adjustments. If Contao gets rid of the install tool in the future and integrates this part into the Contao Manager as well, you won't even have to leave the trakked UI at all anymore. Except, of course, to see if everything is still running, but our Uptime Monitoring will help you with that, too.
Additional advantages thanks to trakked
By the way, this approach comes with a few nice side effects. Amongst other things, you can see who prepared an update and who finally performed it, and even after half a year you can still see which changes were made and when.
As a team at trakked.io, this already saves us several working hours every month, which we can invest in other projects. This makes our maintenance contracts more profitable.
Conclusion: trakked 2.0 saves us a lot of time and helps us earn money.
Once again, we have prepared a short video for you so that you can see how this looks like live.
