Home | News | How the Library is Built – Part 3

Here’s the final part of a mini-series on how the OpenSceneryX library is built, covering the whole process from the initial contribution of an object all the way through to the moment it appears on the end user’s machine.

This post will cover the final part of this process – How the library is released for download.

Stage 10a: Final Pre-release Jobs

The “Enhanced by OpenSceneryX” logo is re-made with the new version number and the release notes are completed. A sitemap for the new website is generated using Google’s own sitemap_gen Python script.

Stage 10b: The Manifest

The manifest serves an important process, described here.  The next job when releasing the library is to create it, and this is done automatically.

Stage 10c: Compression

The installer needs every file to be available, individually zipped.  So to prepare for this, a script is run across the library which zips each file.  Additionally, the entire library is zipped into a single archive for those users who have trouble with the installer. Finally, the new version of the website is compressed for ease of upload.

Stage 10d: Upload

All the compressed files are now uploaded to the web server, into a temporary location.  In total the upload is about 0.5Gb, so it takes a while and the old version of the site is still served up to users during this process, to minimise downtime.

Stage 10e: Uncompression

All the files that were compressed for upload are now uncompressed on the server, still in a temporary location.

Stage 10f: Making it Live

To make it live, the home page of the site is replaced with a “Site temporarily unavailable” version, all the current files and folders are moved to a backup location and the new versions are moved to the live locations. Once this is done, the new home page is deployed and the release is complete.

Stage 11: Announcements

Finally, various announcements are made in forums and messageboards, letting people know that a new version has been released.