Publishing to AWS from Flare

[Jbleasdale]

Hi All,

I want to set a box on AWS as the destination to publish to from Flare, is that doable? Has anyone done it that can offer some advice?

[Jbleasdale]

According to Madcap support... there is no integration. So that's disappointing.

[sarrants]

Our SaaS app is hosted on Amazon S3 and I upload the Helps there as well. Is that what you're talking about?

[Jbleasdale]

Our SaaS app is hosted on Amazon S3 and I upload the Helps there as well. Is that what you're talking about?

I currently copy manually to the AWS container. Ideally I'd like to hit 'Publish' in Flare and have all that happen automatically.

[sarrants]

That's what I'm doing. For one project, I have 13 targets that go to separate subdirectories on Amazon S3. We set up the S3 instances as mapped drives on Windows.
Each Destination is the directory holding the Help files. In the General tab of the Destination Editor, I put the location under Directory.

2017-06-19_9-25-49.png

When I build Help, each help is build and published to its directory. I then have to do a Make Public on each, but you could skip that step if your setup doesn't require it.

[Scotty]

That's what I'm doing. For one project, I have 13 targets that go to separate subdirectories on Amazon S3. We set up the S3 instances as mapped drives on Windows.
Each Destination is the directory holding the Help files. In the General tab of the Destination Editor, I put the location under Directory.

2017-06-19_9-25-49.png

When I build Help, each help is build and published to its directory. I then have to do a Make Public on each, but you could skip that step if your setup doesn't require it.

How did you set up the mapped drives between S3 and Windows? Some manual set up, or using a tool such as TNTdrive?

[sarrants]

Yes -- we use TNTDrive to set up the mapping.

[chrisj]

Yes -- we use TNTDrive to set up the mapping.

I have had the requirement to publish to S3 in the past, and my experience was that mapping to a drive letter was not ideal. What I found to be a more stable solution and one that is easier to automate is to run build and publish on your local machine and then run a sync-delete command in the AWS CLI. You can then automate all of this with a bat file.

[Scotty]

Thanks for the replies and discussion, folks.

[KLAstry]

I, too, publish my Help to S3 buckets. Currently, I (minimally) interact with Git to commit and push the new files to the remote repositories, and then populate our different environments (dev, alpha, beta, Production) using a job written in Jenkins. I can take no credit for the S3 buckets, Git, or Jenkins jobs - engg types have set them up for me.

I haven't been binding my Flare projects (HTML5 Top Nav output) to Git. Therefore, I was (and still am) using my repositories as a placeholder for finished work, not using a master and branches. Don't judge.

As of this week, I planned to begin binding my Flare projects to Git until I read the posts that it doesn't work with 2017r3. I can't take the chance of losing my work (you can find that thread in the Forum), and I sure don't want to go back to r1 and miss out on the new functionality. What have you run into?

[WillWriteForFood]

My company is creating an application hosted on AWS. MadCap does not integrate with AWS, so I might have to manually copy the files over (or use the AWS CLI sync-delete command as I saw in a previous post).

We have a requirement that we cannot download any software to a user's machine. Therefore, we cannot distribute MadCap Help Viewer to customers. How will our customers view our MadCap Flare help files?

Many thanks.

[NorthEast]

We have a requirement that we cannot download any software to a user's machine. Therefore, we cannot distribute MadCap Help Viewer to customers. How will our customers view our MadCap Flare help files?

MadCap Help Viewer is only required for the DotNetHelp output.

If you use HTML5 output instead, you can publish that to a server, so your customers can access it using a browser.

[KLAstry]

I am now publishing my Help projects to AWS by creating branches in Git, checking work out and in, and merging with the master branch. It's working beautifully. No need to bind Help to Git.

[WillWriteForFood]

Dave, Thanks for your response!!