Umbraco User's Guide

USING THE PACKAGER

Chapter 10 introduced you to the power of the packager and how it can help you to share the functionality of what you are developing as part of the Umbraco ecosystem. It also does a lot more than that. It can be your friend when deploying your production website for the first time and even when deploying updates. It's especially useful in cases where you have limited access to the hosting environment where your production system lives in terms of FTP or remote desktop access. Again, refer to Chapter 10 for a step-by-step guide to creating your own packages.

For organization and planning purposes you should version your deployment packages in the name. Although the packager can be used for both initial production deployment and for updates, a recommendation is to use it only when deploying for the first time in a blank Umbraco installation. This avoids any potential for node duplication or node ID confusion and the potential to overwrite existing resources with unintentional changes.

Using Umbraco PRO tools, such as Courier, you can remove the ambiguities and risks of things such as node ID mismatches and overwriting critical assets during deployments. Check out the end of this chapter for more details on how to use Courier.

So, to use the packager follow these simple steps:

1. Navigate to the Developers section of Umbraco. Right-click the Packages node and click ...