Is there a viable way to sync content like documentation from the production environment to dev and test?

[david-fong-bc]

Documentation for syncing and the difference between "config vs. content" is here.

The reason why I first thought of asking this is because there's a known minor "issue" where updating documentation production does not eventually automatically update the documentation in dev and test, and it gets a little trickier still because links in FDC point to the "/node/node-ID" permalinks for documentation nodes, and node IDs in the environments are not in sync (which is very reasonable).

Another thing that might be nice to have periodically synced from prod to dev and test could be taxonomy terms.

Nicole did mention there are content things that probably are not a good idea to sync, maybe such as roles for users.

In the grand scheme of things, this is probably not that important, but I think they may be nice-to-haves if there's an easy way to do it.

For discussion:

• Is this worth doing?
• What other "content" is or isn't a good idea to periodically sync from prod to dev and test?
• What ways are there to do this?
  • How hard are they to implement?

[david-fong-bc]

Dan thinks it's a good idea to copy production data to the test environment, but not dev (dev is just for devs to experiment). If we don't want users / user roles to be synced to test, we could write a task to block that. It's not hard to implement, and it's pretty common to do, so it's worth doing. It should be okay for users in test to get wiped out, but we don't want this to result in notifications getting sent when the copying happens.

TODO: @david-fong-bc create a ticket for copying this.

Chris suggests creating a new ticket every time a refresh is needed, or just reopen the same issue ticket and retag it.