I’m developing on my local machine (apache2, php, mysql). When I want to upload files to my live server (nginx, mysql, php5-fpm), I first backup my www folder, extract the databases, scp everything to my server (which is tedious, because it’s protected with opiekey), log myself in, copy the files from my home directory on the server to my www directory and if I’m lucky and the file permissions and everything else works out, I can view the changes online. If I’m unlucky I’ll have to research what went wrong.
Today, I changed only one file, and had to go through the entire process just for this file. You can imagine how annoying that is. Is there a faster way to do this? A way to automate it all? Maybe something like “commit” in SVN and off you fly?
How do you guys handle these types of things?
PS: I’m very very new to all this, so bear with me! For example I’m always copying files into my home directory on the server, because scp cannot seem to copy them directly into the /var/www folder?!
I think the “SVN” approach is very close to what you really want. You make a cron job that will run “svn update” every few minutes (or hg pull -u if using mercurial, similar with git). Another option is to use dropbox (we use it for our web servers sometimes) – this one is very easy to setyp and share with non-developers (like UI designers)…