How to keep track of plugins being installed

Problem: I have a small team working on a project that is using nopcommerce, one of the problems we are facing is that when one of our devs uploads a plugin using the nopcommerce dashboard and later down the week a different dev deploys their code to the save environment it overwrites that plugin and we lose that data.

How do you guys keep track of what's been installed on nopcommerce once the application has been deployed?

I know there is some kind of RDS settings we can set on nopcommerce to save the plugins.json file but can someone explain more about how this works?

Are there alternatives (perhaps saving the info on the database)?


TLDR; Looking for a solution to keep track of all plugins being installed on a deployed nopcommerce app. That way all dev members will always have up to date .dll and plugins.json info.

Bumping this post one more time, to help keep the thread alive

Trying to understand how you are working. You have two developers and each has their own version of nopCommerce and all the plugins. When they deploy their code they each update the part off or complete code base. Is that what you mean ?

If so that does not sound like a good way to work together as a team - there needs to be some rules created around your working environment using team communication and common tools.
Things like when you are updating a plugin on a production server you should be using an install package to update the version of the plugin rather than ftp'ing and risk overwriting other things.

Are using git and repositories ?
There should be only one version of the main code base which should be in a repository
Then each plugin can have its own repository

Each developer can have their own working version of the main code base / and or plugins but before anyone changes anything they should be pulling the latest changes from the respective central repository then creating a new branch making changes, testing and then eventually merging the branch.

There is plenty of information about this sort of stuff and how to manage it properly
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/connect-team-project?view=vs-2019
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-the-best-development-teams-manage-shared-codebases-2613b5b87185

I am no expert and each has their own way but I know that even when working with just myself I have to diligently follow the rules or it all ends up in a big mess :)

Hey Yidna,

So we have 4 developers and we use BitBucket as our code source, we each make a copy of the code to our locals and each of our locals is pointing to a dev database. Whenever one developer makes a feature/bug change it gets committed to our bit bucket repo and then reviewed and merged into our code source.

The problem we are facing is that once we push our code to production anything on that environment gets wiped. Meaning If someone on the production environment downloads a plugin using the nopcommerce plugin management and they do not communicate it down to the tech department then their changes and plugin get wiped when the devs deploy the development code to production.

I am trying to find an autonomous solution that would help resolve this problem

bump

Maybe im telling you something you already know here :)

I dont know bitbucket but when you say "push our code to production"
production being the website on IIS or where ever
Is that a function of bitbucket or are you doing it via another process outside of bit bucket ?
If it is outside of bitbucket then when uploading to IIS why does everything need to get uploaded ?
In the least case it could just be just uploadig one .dll or one .cshtml file

Sure there needs to be some rules about updating the core. But I would not have though everyone is working on the core each day and they would be working on plugins - or is that also not the case ?

Because working on a plugin you can either only upload just the plugin directory or have an install
package (no need to update everything)