Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Do you see any way things can go wrong?
The beauty of rsync is that it will only publish changes made to files on the staging server. For example, instead of uploading 910 files, it uploads only the 3 that changed. The scan for file changes across the entire directory tree takes less than a second, and then it streams the changes. Nice!
To get this done you need an rsync server running on your desktop, and the rsync client on your production server. I imagine there must be an rsync server you can run on XP and OS X? I run Linux/KDE on my main workstation so it is more straightforward for me.
Sean.
Here is an example /etc/rsyncd/rscynd.conf file:
##begin
[mysite]
path = /site/abc.com/html
exclude = secret/* dynamic/*
uid = 501
gid = 501
##end
Then, on the production server, you'd run:
cd /sites/abc.com/html
rsync -rv rsync://dev.abc.com/mysite
And it would connect to your rsyncd server on your dev.abc.com machine, and run an update using the "mysite" configuration directives. In this example it would run as a specific user:group (501:501), and ignore files in /sites/abc.com/html/secret/* and /sites/abc.com/html/dynamic/*.
For more info you might google "rsyncd" and read some advanced instructions; I only consider myself an intermediate user at this point and I'm certain there are power tricks that I haven't stumbled over yet ;)
Sean.