There are some great development modules for Drupal (Devel, Coder, Reroute_Email, Demo, etc), but you probably don't want to have them enabled in a production environment. Deployments to production can be simplified by adding a hook_update_N function in your module's .install file. In this function you can take care of administrative functions such as importing views and CCK node type definitions (essentially, anything exportable). In this quick code snippet, I'll show how you can create a module update function to disable your development modules on update.
<?php
// NOTE: see the documentation on hook_update_N for version naming conventions
function MYMODULE_update_6100() {
// check for production environment hostname
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'your-production-hostname') {
// rebuild the module cache
module_rebuild_cache();
// define a list of development modules to disable
$modules_disable = array(
'reroute_email',
'coder',
'demo',
'performance',
'devel_node_access',
'devel_generate',
'devel_themer',
'devel',
);
// disable modules
module_disable($modules_disable);
}
}
?>Now that your module update function is created, you can deploy your file updates to production (preferably using subversion) and run the update.php script, apply your module update, and disable your development modules.
