Utoxin’s Random Insanity – CakePHP + Symlinks = Pain

Now that I’ve had a day or so to recover, I’m going to tell you about what I just spent 2-3 weeks trying to resolve. By way of explanation, our main product at work is a CakePHP based CMS application. It has a lot of neat features, including the ability for users to upgrade to newer versions any time they choose. We keep all versions present in /etc/precious_core/<version_number>/, and each user has a symlink to the relevant directory in their webroot.

When they upgrade, part of the process is to replace that symlink with a new on that points at their new version. For a long time we’ve known there was a problem of some kind related to CakePHP’s cache that developed after upgrades, but it was never a huge problem, so we mostly just ignored it. However, in a recent release, it started causing major problems, and I got tasked with finding and fixing the actual bug. I figured it would take a day or two, and I’d be done with it. Little did I know just how painful this was going to be.

I initially tried several ways of forcing the cache to get cleared when the app was upgraded. That worked well, as far as it went, but then a new problem surfaced. At least half the time, the cache would re-populate with bad data after an upgrade. Some of the cached file paths would be for the wrong version of the central app, for no apparent reason. I tried throwing even more thorough cache clearing at it. Things got a little better, but it still wasn’t working.

Finally, I fully duplicated our production setup on my local dev machine, parallel version directories included, and installed a PHP debugger, so I could step through the code and figure out what exactly was going on.

via Utoxin’s Random Insanity – CakePHP + Symlinks = Pain. Debugging oh what a joy it is.