I’m starting to use Mercurial on my web server (in this case MediaTemple’s Grid). I’ve used SVN previously, though I’m not an expert of version control systems. I’m just needing a little help with clearing up some confusion with getting it set up optimally.
I have a ‘data’ folder which is outside the web server root and that the browser cannot access. It was recommended to me before to have my Mercurial repositories setup here, then I would clone from here locally on my computer. I would also have a ‘domains’ folder that is basically the web server root and inside there is my actual domains where my websites are actually served to the browser – these would need to be updated from the ‘data’ repositories too.
But with this in mind, after setting it up, it seems inefficient… I’m cloning to my local (that makes sense), adding, committing, pushing. That’s fine… But then I’m then updating in my data repository folder and then updating in my domains folder to actually update my websites.
Surely, I don’t actually need this ‘data’ folder for repositories? Wouldn’t my actual live ‘domains’ folders be the main repositories themselves? So I’m cloning locally and updating from these? Please help me clear some confusions with all this (if you can).
It’s strictly a matter of personal preference. Some folks make their live websites also the “master” repo, and some make it a clone of an elsewhere located repo. What you’re doing right is serving your sites from directory in the repo, that’s a good choice.
Some considerations as to whether you might want separate ‘data’ clones independent from the web root clones are:
One thing to note is that in the ‘data’ repo you can do
hg update -r nullwhich gets rid of the working copy (but keeps the repo!), so that the diskspace used is almost zero (assuming it’s a clone of the webroot they’ll share the same underlying files at the FS hardlink level).