Deploying files, from single publications, to multiple folders

Question

I have the following setup:

• Two publication targets -Staging xpm and Staging
• Single publication -P1
• Single deployer -D1
• Single web server -W1
• Databases -DB1 and DB2

I would like to publish items from P1 through "Staging xpm" target, over deployer D1 to database DB1 and to folder on W1 c:\xpm-website\

At the same time, I would like to publish items from same publication P1, through "Staging" target, using same deployer D1 to database D2 and folder on W1 c:\website\

In other words, I would like to configure storage layer to behave differently based on Publication target used. Is this possible without some sort of storage extension?

I am aware that I can create additional publications to inherit my publication and use pub id storage configuration, but this is not the approach I can use.

Answer 1

No. The deployer isn't aware of what type of target is being used; so it won't be able to behave differently. You would need a second deployer.

That being said, why are you trying to make such a setup? What are you trying to achieve?

Answer 2

Since, this is not supported OOB, any solution approach that you are going to come up with is going to be hacky solution which will most probably cause some unwarranted issue in future. That being said, I am not sure if there is a solution though, since you want separate content on both brokers with and without xpm (which rules out some automatic replication/deployment options).

Please consider to spin up a second deployer. You can also setup 2 deployers on the same server as well, in case you just wish to avoid setting up new infrastructure for this.

Answer 3

Not suggesting it's the best solution but we have a similar setup for one of our websites: One deployer is used to push content out to multiple environments from one publication. That side of things is not my field of expertise, but I believe we have multiple folders set up on the deployment server that the different publication targets publish to and then have a secondary process that moves the published content to the different environments based on the folder name. I should add that this is only used for our test environments and not for production.

Answer 4

There are two approaches that can be used:

1. As suggested by @Rogier - use second deployer to make it work so that one deployer will handle deployment for non-xpm web site and other deployer for xpm web site.
2. If you still want to use one deployer and achieve this, then option is to use database replication and file server replication. i.e. Deployer deploys on one database and file server then replication takes care of moving it to other database and file server.

One question that I am curious is, why one deployer and not two deployers? Is there any use case for the same?

Update based on details on in comments:

Due to clarifications provided in comment, the above mentioned approaches will not work. Still there are two other approaches that can be used:

1. Hacky way: For non-xpm site, use odata instead of using content delivery JARs, that way site will ignore xpm tags as comments. In this case, you don't need two deployers and not even two databases. One database and one deployer will work.
2. Non-hacky way: You will have to create two targets which will correspond to individual deployer. One target for xpm site and one for non-xpm site and then in TBB, you will have put logic based on target to filter out xpm tags for non-xpm target. In this case you will need two deployers and two databases.