Added theme is not registered during production mode

[moleman]

It seems that added / installed themes are not registered if they are added to a site which is already installed and is set to production mode. By registered I mean that they are not added to the theme table.

After looking at the code it seems that themes are registered differently depending on mode.

In developer mode:

• Registered at https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/develop/app/code/Magento/Theme/Model/Theme/Plugin/Registration.php#L74 which means that the installed theme will be registered correctly during development (or all modes except production).

In production mode:

• Registered in observer, https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/develop/app/code/Magento/Theme/Observer/ThemeRegistrationObserver.php#L47. The event is fired in the installation script of magento/module-theme, https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/develop/app/code/Magento/Theme/Setup/InstallData.php#L54 which means that it will only register themes during the initial installation of the site and not during upgrades.

This means that if you have a running site in production mode and you decide to install a new theme it will not be registered in the theme table which means that it will not be selectable in the admin.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install Magento2, run the installation wizard
2. Set deploy mode to production, php bin/magento deploy:mode:set production
3. Add a theme with: composer require
4. Run php bin/magento setup:upgrade

Expected result:

The installed theme should be registered in the theme table.

Actual result:

The installed theme is not registered in the theme table.

[slavvka]

Hi @moleman. Thank you for your inquiry but it is not a bug. Such actions like updating code, adding themes etc aren't supposed to be performed on production since they may lead to unpredictable and unstable site work. Usually such changes should be done not in production mode on some staging server and lately published on production.

[moleman]

@slavvka Yes, and that is what we do. We have a build server that builds the sites cleanly with Composer and this is where the new code is introduced. These build artifacts are then deployed to staging and production servers and we then run setup:upgrade to upgrade the database in production after the deployment of the code is done.

So, whats the correct workflow then when you want to add a new theme to a production site so that the theme gets registered in the theme database table? Because currently if we add a new theme it never gets registered because of the issue above.

[davidalger]

@slavvka This may not sound like a bug at first read, but the OP isn't talking about developing on a production site, but rather a deployment procedure. There are CLI commands to enable/disable modules, and to "uninstall" a theme, but none to install/activate/register a theme. Builds must be pushed to production in some fashion, and then setup:upgrade run to execute install scripts, and new components moving to production as part of a build need to be registered somehow, whether that is automatic when setup:upgrade is done (as would be expected) or at minimum via a CLI command to register them with the system so it knows about them.

If there is an existing mechanism in the system to roll non-module components out to production and register them without re-installing the software from scratch, it would be great if you could make note of what that is. If there isn't a way to do this, then it is a bug and needs to be solved.

[davefarthing]

I have the same experience. Similarly we are not attempting to install a theme directly to production, rather we are installing/creating a theme in dev. then much like @moleman, we use composer to generate a fresh code instance on a clean server before deploying the updated code to the production environment. The successful deployment then triggers 'setup:upgrade' to be run on the production servers in order to run the module updates and schema upgrades. _(I see no other sensible way of performing data-install and updates on the production DB...)_

None of this process adds a new theme record to the 'theme' table so not sure how this is supposed to be achieved.... set the site to developer mode to allow the theme to register... surely not!

I too am interested in what approach is therefore recommended be to update the theme records (and other schema / record changes) in a production environment if this is by "design".

Surely this is a bug that needs fixing.....

[mazhalai]

Thank you all for your input, we have created MAGETWO-47999 to fix it.