Question

I am coding a website using the Codeigniter PHP framework.

I am using mercurial for version control.

I have 3 systems I work with. I do my coding on a Windows 7 machine using Netbeans 6.9.1. I am occasionally making commits, and pushing to a repository at Bitbucket.org, purely for the purposes of backup and version control.

I have a “beta” website (on a shared Linux box with it’s own dedicated IP address) that I upload to using FTP, where I can test that everything is working as intended on an actual site running Linux.

Once I’m happy with that, I upload to my “live” site, which is on it’s own dedicated server. Again I’m just using FTP to upload the files from my development server.

I realize that this is all kinds of wrong. For one thing I have to go in and change some things on the beta and live machines so that they’re referring to the correct domain name, instead of localhost. For another, I’m not making use of mercurial at all to help with this. I assume instead of uploading from FTP, I could be using mercurial to “grab” a particular revision that I’ve marked as ready to deploy. I also think I could possibly be doing something in Netbeans differently to make the process easier.

What I want to do is have some very smoothe way to control all this, and hopefully one that knows how to deal with the issue of a slightly different configuration setup for the beta and live sites from the localhost.

Is there a standard way to do what I’m looking for? I’ve seen references to some third party apps for “continuous integration” but I’m not sure I need anything like that.

I’m a little lost as to what would be the SIMPLEST thing for me to do that would make my life easier….any help greatly appreciated 🙂 Thanks!

Answer 1

It depends on how different the setup for each site is, and if there are secrets involved, which should not be visible on a public place (I assume you use a public bitbucket repository).

If the changes are not sensitive, then you can add two additional branches for your test and production servers, where only the configuration changes are applied. Every time you change something in default and deploy it to test, you would simply merge default on top of test, and mercurial fill in the different configuration settings in the process. Then the server deployment wold be a call to hg archive within the correct branch.

A typical change history would look like this:

O----o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o---o      default
 \          \           \
  T1--------T2-----------T3   test
   \                      \
    P1---------------------P2 production

where in T1 and P1 the parameters for test and production are filled in. You also can use this branch setup to mature the development of your site, where you hack in default, and only propagate stable changes into test and production.

If the changes are sensitive, you can create a non-versionized deploy script (or better a versionized deployment script and a not versionized configuration file), which patches the output of hg archive.

You should use deployment scripts anyway, which handles the packaging of the product and deploy an the target in an automated and standardized way. Within this script you can also embed information about the source revision into the final archive.

Note that this model works fine for an environment, where no changes are made on the server. If you do changes to the product on the server, you need to copy the files from the server back into your development environment(at the correct revision), to check what was changed on the server. When you want to make changes also on the server, you might want to install mercurial also there.