Agile Trailblazers Blog

Why Sync Spaces?

Contentful provides spaces to group related resources into one repository. The content from these spaces can then be retrieved using Contentful’s Content Delivery APIs. In situations where development is occurring on a website while a live (production) website is available and both are using the same space, there is a danger that development changes will be visible on the live website. To avoid running into such situations, it is desirable to have separate spaces for development and production and have a mechanism to sync these spaces periodically in a controlled environment.

Challenges While Syncing Spaces

There are some sync tools currently out there that provide a mechanism to sync from one space to another. However, these tools have limitations:

1. Most of these sync tools are command-line based.
2. They don’t provide a mechanism for the user to know the differences between the spaces and accept the changes for synchronization.
3. They fail to modify embedded URLs properly (to the Media in the space) within a Content.

In our experience, the embedded URL issue (#3) has caused us some major headaches.  After the sync process, this leaves the Content in the production space pointing at the Media in development space. Not a good situation!