Blog

Feydra and the Virtual Sandbox

April 20, 2017 | Angel Uzunov

Feydra virtualizes all front end assets (css, js & cshtml) of a Sitecore instance allowing front-end developers to commit their changes to Source Control without requiring the intervention of a back-end developer; essentially giving each front-end developer their own virtual sandbox. With Feydra, each developer can activate their own sandboxed version of the website, while being on the same physical website (which is why Feydra is so cool!). They can even activate as a different front-end developer to see their team mates changes.

The virtual sandbox environment is the place under the FeydraRoot/Username/ folder where each front-end developer would have their front-end artifacts uploaded (scripts, styles, etc.) and Feydra will then make it possible for the front-end developer to test these artifacts against the actual website where it's running.

Since multiple front-end developers can work on a single Sitecore web instance, Feydra provides each front-end developer their own individual virtual sandbox environment (separated for each user under the FeydraRoot/Username/ folders). And if, for instance, there are multiple front-end developers working on the same feature (one could be doing JS, CSS or HTML etc.), merging of changes still only happens in source control. After a front-end developer is happy with their changes inside the sandboxed virtual environment, they can committ/check-in the changes to source control. Other front-end developers can get the latest version, merge it with their changes and see if it breaks their work on their own virtual environment. Once they’re happy, they can also commit.

To push their changes to the virtual sandbox, front-end developers need to either manually copy, choose to use an FTP or other file upload service, or use the front-end tools like Sublime or WebStorm which can be configured to copy files to a target folder on each save automatically.

For back-end developers, it’s even easier. Because the virtual sandbox is just a folder inside the target website environment (either Dev Int, QA, UAT or something else), where normal back-end developers are already working, doing normal code and item deployments as they are used to. Because of this arrangement, back-end code will already be deployed on the environment where Feydra is also installed. This allows front-end developers to start working on their own components without having to own a local (Dev) Sitecore instance.

We've answered several questions from the community in our Feydra FAQ blog, or you can download Feydra today!

Feydra development

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