Question

Typically I develop my websites on trunk, then merge changes to a testing branch where they are put on a ‘beta’ website, and then finally they are merged onto a live branch and put onto the live website.

With a Facebook application things are a bit tricky. As you can’t view a Facebook application through a normal web browser (it has to go through the Facebook servers) you can’t easily give each developer their own version of the website to work with and test.

I have not come across anything about the best way to develop and test a Facebook application while continuing to have a stable live website that users can use. My question is this, what is the best practice for organising the development and testing of a Facebook application?

Answer 1

I hope I understood your question correctly.

What we have is 2 versions of our app, that is two applications defined in facebook.

We have the regular version that runs on deploy, and we have the myapp-test version.
this version runs on the domain myapptest.com (or you can use myapp.local).

In your HOSTS file (%winder%\system32\drivers\etc) define this url and redirect it to your own server on localhost (127.0.0.1).

Now, all you need is a config file on each machine that is not updated via source-control.
The localhost (development) version uses the app_id for the myapp-test, and relevant settings.
The deploy uses the other settings.

Then when you deploy you just need to upload your code.