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How to sincronize local and server websites?

c-c-m - July 5, 2009 - 19:02

Hello,

I am a newbie with maintaing sites and I would like to know and learn about your experiences about how do you work in order to have an up-to-date local copy of your websites and how do you work in order to make some testing before making changes to the live site. I didn't care much about where do I download the files and I didn't get a local copy of my sites which now has resulted not to be a good idea (it's obvious now, but I didn't realize about that at the begining). In order to make some testing I created a multisite test which shared the core and themes and most modules, but I do not know if there are better options.

Hope anybody want to share with us their experiences, so people like me can learn from them.

Thanks

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Documentation is your friend

ScoutBaker - July 5, 2009 - 19:30

There's already information about this available in the Developing for Drupal guide. Specifically you may find Keeping Your Local and Remote Sites Synchronized to be useful.

---
"Nice to meet you Rose...run for your life." - The Doctor
My first public Drupal site - EyeOnThe503

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Thank you for your quick

c-c-m - July 5, 2009 - 21:23

Thank you for your quick response. I'll take a look at it.

EDIT: I have read the link provided, but I expected to find more users' experiences. The text only mentions two systems but I would like to know, for example, if someone used #1 which problems did they encounter or which were their bigger pros... if there's a method #3... this kind of things that can be learnt from experience not only from books

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Depends.... so many

redpuma - July 5, 2009 - 22:45

Depends.... so many variables, how big is the site, how do you work (subversion, cvs, ssh access or ftp only), your workflow.
On the live site only content and uploaded files should be different to how it was when it left the dev environment. Meanwhile anything could happen on the dev env (new modules, permissions, etc etc). In my experience how the syncronisation is done depends on the above and the stage in the project. Not much of an answer so far.

You could use the Backup and Migrate module to take a copy of testing/live and apply that to the development site. And copy the files directory from testing/live to development. Then do your changes on development and test.

  1. Then manually do those same changes to the testing/live.
  2. Or write a module and put all the configuration changes into an update hook.
  3. Or implement the Database scripts module into your workflow

This drupal group discusses this here http://groups.drupal.org/change-management-systems

Hope that ramble is helpful..

Steve

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