Question

I am looking for an automatic solution to sync the file tree as well as a MySQL database, and as a bonus, I’d like to perform some basic file manipulation when I do the sync. Currently my dev server is my Mac running local copies of Apache and MySQL. My code is all stored in SVN.

In the past I’ve been able to fashion a “build script” of sorts on my server, that would check out the contents of SVN and move it into place on the server. This wasn’t bad (and was certainly the fastest way to get the latest version of the site online, plus it gave me version control in case I needed to roll back the site) but it didn’t do anything with MySQL.

Is there a good/standard/”right” way to do what I’m trying to do? Should I just keep a dev database on the live server, access it remotely on my (local) dev machine, and then copy the dev database to the live db on the server when I’m ready to migrate changes?

Answer 1

rsync is probably what you want to sync files. It can preserve everything including permissions, and is well-optimized to minimize the amount of network transfer necessary, even for binary blobs.

As for MySQL: you can either rsync the mysqldump output, or use binary logging (or if you keep the same database version, copy the table files – but that’s trickier).

There is no “right” way to do this. You usually just need to set up a mirrored environment and work away. Of course, in an ideal world you’d script every change you make to the dev copy, so that moving the modifications over would just consist of running the script on the live server…

A script file you run is as good as any other automatic solution.