We are currently setting up a new server to upgrade from our old Windows 2003/Coldfusion 8 server to a Windows 2008/Coldfusion 9 server.
It’s not been a simple migration. Newer/changed features in both IIS and Coldfusion has forced us to alter our code and setup and little bit.
We were wondering if there was some kind of program, or even a cloud-based service, that we could use to compare a site before and after a migration. I guess simple link checking would suffice, but to be completely thorough, we were wondering if there was a solution that would also check the content of the pages. (This was an idea from our boss, and given how large a site could be, I doubt this is a feasible task; so I would be happy with link checking and comparing the response statuses.)
I guess the goal would be if “foo.cfm” was OK before the migration, but is then throwing 500 server errors after, we would know something needs to be looked at.
I know link checkers are common, but didn’t know if any would support this kind of feature (to compare the results of one run over another). I also couldn’t think exactly how to phrase this for a Google search, so I figured I would ask the great minds here at StackOverflow.
Thanks in advance for any help!
If your site is relatively static, you could try using curl or wget to spider the site pre-migration, then use it to spider the site post-migration. Then use Beyond Compare (or other directory-capable diff tools)to compare the two folder trees.
If your site has random elements or date-related stuff, this approach won’t work so well, but you can try it out now, just spider the current site a few hours apart and see how much is different.
That gets you content-aware comparison of the site and may well get you your list of stuff to investigate quickly. You could also try it on the development version of the new site to look for problems pre-launch.