Running Multiple Versions of TACTIC

Multiple versions of TACTIC can be easily run side by side on the same machine. This is extremely useful for testing purposes. Running a newer version of TACTIC on a production server machine using the production server environment and production database. You can run this without interrupting service ot the production server.

If this is not explicitly set, TACTIC will use whatever settings exist when TACTIC was first installed. These are defined in the tacticenv module which is first imported on all command line TACTIC scripts by:

import tacticenv

These values are typically found in the Python distribution site-packages. The exact location of these files can vary between differing operarting systems, but common examples are:

windows: C:\Python27\site-packages\Lib\site-packages\tacticenv

linux: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages

When TACTIC starts up, it will first look at the environment variable TACTIC_INTALL_DIR to determine which distribution of TACTIC will be used. Before a newer version of TACTIC is executed, it is necessary to upgrade to the newer database schema. Unless clearly stated in the distribution release, it is always safe to upgrade the database for a newer version. Changes to the database are always backwards compatible, so that older versions of TACTIC can always run on newer schema of the database.

Steps

  1. Unzip a TACTIC distribution anywhere in the file system. For purposes of examples, /home/apache will be used as the base directory for TACTIC

    cd /home/apache
unzip tactic-3.0.0.zip

  2. Set the environment variable TACTIC_INSTALL_DIR

    export TACTIC_INSTALL_DIR=/home/apache/tactic-3.0.0

  3. Upgrade the database.

    su apache
cd tactic-3.0.0.src/bin
python3 upgrade_db.py

  4. Execute tactic

    python3 startup_dev.py

This will execute TACTIC from the command line in dev mode. All output will go to this console.