Planning Your Front-End Staging Process

In the Coveo Platform 7, all the files associated with search interfaces are contained in the [.Net_Front-End_Path]\Web\Coveo\Skins folder on each Front-End server.  Each Front-End server contains its copy of the search interface folders.

Example: The files for the My Computer search interface are stored in the C:\Program Files\Coveo .NET Front-End 12\Web\Coveo\Skins\My Computer folder.

You can implement a Front-End staging process in an environment where you have two or more Coveo Front-End servers. You use one of the Front-End servers as the staging server where you customize and test search interfaces without affecting the other Front-End servers. When you are ready to synchronize the other Front-End servers, you use the Deployment tab of the Interface Editor to easily replicate the search interfaces from the source staging Front-End server to one or more target production Front-End servers. You can deploy search interfaces within a Coveo instance or between Coveo instances.

Important: For the Coveo Platform 7 Beta 1 only, to be able to successfully use the search interface settings deployment, you must run the http://localhost:[Port_number]/?ExportSettings=1 URL once on each Front-End server to generate local XML files in the [.Net_Front-End_Path]\Web\Coveo\Skins\ folder.

To plan your Front-End staging process

1. Identify one of your Coveo Front-End servers as the staging Front-End server.

2. When your Coveo Front-End servers are organized in a network load-balancing (NLB) cluster, pull the staging Front-End server out of the NLB cluster (see Configuring Coveo Servers in a Network Load-Balancing Cluster).

3. On the staging Front-End server:

   1. Using the Interface Editor, customize and test one or more search interfaces.

   2. Create the list of target Front-End servers to which you want to replicate search interface settings (see Managing the List of Target Front-End Servers).

   3. Push the settings of the search interfaces from the staging Front-End server to one or more production Front-End servers (see Deploying Search Interface Settings).

4. For NLB configurations, bring back the staging Front-End server into the NLB cluster.