Linux: Uploading files to a live server - How to automate process?

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)...

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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?! Linux ssh scp link|improve this question asked Jul 15 '11 at 16:57Frank Vilea931110 91% accept rate.

There are many utilities which will do that for you. If you know python, try fabric. If you know ruby, you may prefer capistrano.

They allow you to script both local and remote operations. If you have a farm of servers to take care of, those two might not work at the scale you want. For over 10 servers, have a look at chef or puppet to manage your servers completely.

Whether you deploy from local checkout, packaged source (my preferred solution), remote repository, or something entirely different is up to you. Whatever works for you is ok. Just make sure your deployments are reproducible (that is you can always say "5 minutes ago it wasn't broken, I want to have what now what I had 5 minutes ago").

Whatever way of versioning you use is better than no versioning (tagged releases are probably the most comfortable).

Rsync will send only the changes between your local machine and the remote machine. It would be an alternative to scp. You can look into how to set it up to do what you need.

You can't copy to /var/www because the credentials you're using to log in for the copy session doesn't have access to write on /var/www. Assuming you have root access, change the group (chown) on /var/www (or better yet, a sub directory) to your group and change the permissions to allow your group write access (chmod g+w). Rsync is fairly lightweight, so it should be simple to get going.

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