Tag: staging

Redirecting outgoing mail with Postfix

We have a various staging deployments of our systems at Brightbox and need to test that the emails they send are correct. We have a bunch of test accounts registered with various email addresses and we wanted them all to go to our dev team, rather than the original recipient.

Rather than write support for this into our apps, we used Postfix to redirect the mail to our devs.

In our case, our staging deployments use a local installation of Postfix and the systems are generally not used by anything else, which makes this dead easy.

Firstly, write a rewrite map file, with the following one line of content. Call it /etc/postfix/recipient_canonical_map:

/./ devteam@example.com

Then configure Postfix like this (in /etc/postfix/main.cf):

 recipient_canonical_classes = envelope_recipient recipient_canonical_maps = regexp:/etc/postfix/recipient_canonical_map

Now all mail going through this relay will be redirected to devteam@example.com. It rewrites only the envelope, so the important headers are not changed.

11/6/2011 6 Comments

Making a staging database with sed

Quick one – thought was was cute and useful. I take a copy of live databases once in a while for use in the staging environments, but some apps have references to the live url in the there (WordPress does this and makes all its redirects using it, making it particularly difficult to test in staging).

This is a simple little way to change all the urls in the db as you clone it:

mysqldump -h live_db_host -u user -pmypass live_db | sed -e '{s/www.example.com/staging.example.com/g}' | mysql -h staging_db_host -u user -pmypass staging_db

Though depending on your MySQL table type you might want to dump to disk first, then pipe it through sed as your live tables might be locked (I’m not actually sure if mysqldump will block waiting for the other processes to catch up)

26/4/2008 1 Comment