Effectively manage more than 50 SMF installations

[volwin]

Hello,

I've been hosting some SMF installations in a virtual server of mine, the number of which installations gradually increased over time. Nowadays it's about 50 installations. Every forum is used by a different community, the only thing i do is hosting and system admnistration. As you may understand 50 installations (and growing) is a hell of sysadmin work, especially when update/patch time is coming.

My experience with other piece of software e.g. wordpress made me wondering if there is an effective way to get numerous SMF installations in a farm or something similar, in order to easily upgrade them all together instead of doing this work manually in every single directory.

If there is already a way to do that please let me know; i failed to find anything relevant.

Here's  a thing that crossed my mind and could possibly work:

a) keep a central directory with the latest SMF source code (optionally track this directory with git)
b) every SMF instance has its own directory with avatars, attachmens and Settings.php
c) for every SMF instance don't copy the SMF source code in its own directory, but make sof links instead pointing to the central directory

When an update/patch is out, i just update the central directory keeping the SMF source code. Then every SMF instance is instantly updated too.

Is this gonna work?

In case the SMF update requires some change in the database, i could also run the update script for every SMF instcance/directory.

Thanks in advance.

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[vbgamer45]

Has been done before. I do it my forum hosting using one set of files for all boards. But limits customization in some ways you can't install packages you would have to modify the files and make sure all database tables are made for each hosted site/forum.