my project is a PHP web application. This applies to my test server (local), not production server! I am also the solo developer on this project (however, that may change in the very far future). Also, all my source code is committed to a repository and the production server gets the source code from the repository.
I do my development in Windows while my test server runs on Ubuntu (perhaps you can also recommend me another distro that is easy to use and can serve as a good web server). I need an elegant way to interface between the two environments. Currently, I do my coding in Windows and then FTP the changed files to the test server. However, this is quite cumbersome and tedious since I have to manually go to my FTP client each time. Suggest me something elegant please! Perhaps FTP sync? or OpenVPN (where the root www directory on test server is acts like a folder in Windows)? Thanks for your awesome time!
Easiest would be in Ubuntu, right click a folder then click "Sharing Options", then share the folder. In Windows, connect to the share, and work on that copy.
If you're using version control, using continuous integration like Hudson ( http://hudson-ci.org/ ) would help if you create a task that builds/exports the website for the testing server. This approach would be better in the long term, but you'll waste a day setting it up initially.
I prefer SFTP to FTP.
That said, ExpanDrive lets you map SFTP servers to local drive letters, which then means you can use any text editor to access your files directly on the test server, or use other mechanisms to keep the files in sync. Since they show up as two local drives, you can use just about any product out there.
If you want to use FTP, you can just map the drive in Windows Explorer. If you open up My Computer, then go to Tools > Map Network Drive, you can map a FTP server folder to any local drive. Just type in the address as the folder, ie. ftp://mscharley#192.168.0.10/htdocs
This will atleast save you a trip to the FTP client...
Is there any reason you couldn't just test on your local computer? At my job, we all develop and do developer testing locally, most of us using Windows. Our production and test servers are all linux based. Working locally is really nice, because you don't need to worry about making changes on the server with every small change.
Another option would be to create a checkout or working copy of your code on the server, and then run svn up or svn export (or equivalent using your version control software) each time you change the code on the server (assuming you are sshd into the server). This is kind of slow, but it's easy. The other option would be to write a script that goes through the svn logs for the recent commit and only exports or updates the ones that changed. This is much faster, and for all I know, there is already something out there that this.
Finally, some IDEs allow you to edit files live over ftp\sftp. Basically the IDE downloads a copy of the code and then reuploads it when you save.
Currently I develop on windows (PHP) as well and deploy on a Linux box for testing and production. This is how I do it.
Set up a local development server with e.g. WAMP.
Set up your code base in version control, e.g. Subversion.
Checkout your code base onto the testing/staging server, not just only on your local dev. environment.
In the early stages of development you want to deploy to the testing environment A LOT to sort out any discrepancies between your windows and linux environments. When your programming efforts turn more into program flow type programming this constant testing will probably slow down. But still take the effort to test on a regular basis.
To test your code base on staging do an svn update. I just log in with an SSH session to do this. A key thing here to note is that you do not have to make any config changes to your code base. If you do need to make config changes to your environment on staging it worth while spending the time to SCRIPT this process rather than this being a manual process.
Do the same for production. I use an Subversion check out on production as well. Make sure you set you .htaccess file to deny access to your hidden .svn folders and script the deployment especially if there a config changes necessary.
Some ideas:
Use a server environment under windows (e.g. EasyPHP).
Use a development tool that can save over FTP (e.g. ultra edit).
Use a network drive connected to the remote machine via FTP.
Use a network drive connected to the remote machine via Samba.
Run a linux distro inside a virtualization tool (e.g. virtual box) and write from the windows host to a share directory of the guest host.
Use dropbox to sync files between machines (there is more a hack than an "enterprise" solution).
Related
Hello I have been wanting to get into working with a framework and Laravel seems like a decent one to try.
I have seen a lot of tutorials that tell you how to setup Laravel locally with Homestead or variants.
I am wanting to install and setup Laravel on my dedicated remote server with my hosting company. From there I want to be able to work with it on my local MacBook or MacPro.
I have not been able to find a good tutorial to make this happen in the fashion I want to do it.
I work with PHP and related daily but usually login to FTP and edit files with TextWrangler and save them and go about my day so my methods are dated and not efficient.
One side note is that I also have a Dell PowerEdge server running CentOS and VestaCP in my office as my development server so nothing is done locally per say (on my own computer) so the question and answer will apply to both my remote server and my remote but local development server.
Any suggestions are always welcome.
Best Regards,
Bradley
Assuming you have full root access to your remote servers, you should install composer on them and install Laravel in whichever way suits you. Then you can edit your project files just as if you were working on it locally.
Seriously though, the biggest thing you should add to your development arsenal (in case you haven't already) which will make your development process so much more resilient is Git.
Set up a free Bitbucket account, get a free Git client, and learn how commits, pushes, pulls, branches and deployments work. The easiest approach for deployment is to use a service such as Envoyer.
That way you can develop and test locally (even if 'locally' is a remote machine) and not really have to worry about breaking your app by making a mistake in controller or something on the live server.
I have some source code on my Mac, and in order to test I'm interested in synchronizing it with a VM containing a similar web server setup to the production environment. Therefore I need to be able to automatically copy files over to the VM every time there are changes.
I know I can use rsync to do this manually whenever a script is run but I need some way of getting it to run in the background every single time a file in a particular directory or one of its sub-directories is modified.
I know inotifywait exists on Linux machines and could solve this problem. I've also read about the FSEvents API and kqueue. However, none of these seem to be accessible from the command line and I really don't want to spend a long time making something to do this...
I guess I could use a cronjob but a minute is a pretty long time to wait to see changes on a website...
Any ideas?
I do this all the time, developing on a Windows/Linux/Mac workstation, and saving changes to a remote Linux server where they're immediately served back to my workstation's browser for testing. You've got a couple options:
You could mount the remote files locally (like via sshfs) and make changes directly to them. I.e., your Mac thinks the files are local, so you can edit them with your GUI editor, but when you File->Save, it actually saves the file remotely. The main downside to this is that you can't work when disconnected from the server.
Mount the local files remotely. This would allow you to work locally while disconnected but won't allow the test site to work when disconnected -- which may not be a big deal. This option might not be doable if you don't have the right tools/access on the remote server.
(My preference.) Use NetBeans IDE, which has a very nice "copy to remote" feature. You maintain a full copy of all files locally, and edit them directly. When you hit File->Save on a file, NetBeans will save it locally and transparently scp/ftp it to your remote server.
How about using a DVCS like git or mercurial, and having the local repo run post-commit hooks to run the rsync and then the test itself?
I'm a bit confused about why you can't just run rsync from the same script that runs the test. If you run rsync -e ssh you can set up automatic public key authentication between the VM and the Mac. There won't be anything manual about the rsync in that case.
You might be able to set up a launchd agent to do what you want for a simple setup. See this question and the man page for launchd.plist for more information about the launchd WatchPath key. But it looks like WatchPath may not work for changes within sub-directories.
I am starting with Bazaar (switching from Subversion, sorry if terminology is a bit off sometimes). Using Bazaar locally no problems.
Got bzr+ssh:// working on my Windows server (finally! and even ssh agent is working wow!)
Now I want a shared repository on the server from which the developers can branch to their machines. I want the repository in a specific folder, for example in C:\bzr\MyProject.
When I do:
bzr init-repo --no-trees bzr+ssh://myserver.com/MyProject
it creates the repository in C:\cygwin\home\user\MyProject in the home directory of my user account - it is understandable, but worrying.
Then as an experiment I also tried and succeeded:
bzr init-repo --no-trees bzr+ssh://myserver.com/C:\bzr\MyProject
This created the repository where I wanted. But how do I "map" or "alias" the URL (or bzr) so my developers can logon under their accounts and use URL
bzr+ssh://myserver.com/MyProject
to access the shared repository in C:\bzr\MyProject?
Obviously I don't want developers to use bzr+ssh://myserver.com/C:\bzr\MyProject because of the physical path in the URL.
Ok my own answer is if you want to run Bazaar on a Windows server for a development team who will access it over the internet,
and you are not familiar with Linux, Cygwin, SSHD and related stuff then it might turn out more complicated than you can bear.
I actually abandoned the Bazaar idea and gone with Mercurial. I must say Mercurial install on the server is also steep, but at least it is just Windows, IIS and only a bit of Python. Got it running in half a day.
Some of the problems that I had with bzr+ssh:// on a Windows server are:
Needs SSHD installed on the server. SSHD (from stripped down Cygwin) supplied with Bazaar refused to work. Had to install Cygwin and learn a bit of Linux stuff, how to run as a service, how to configure, how to generate keys.
Hard to add a new user in a way that does not request passwords typing for each command. Will need to generate a keypair, mock with copying the keys to th server in two locations (Cygwin's home user folder and Window's too). Probably need to log on the user to Windows to create a profile. Don't want developers logging on to the server actually.
Hard to set up a shared repository in a specific location on the server. Does not seem possible with bzr+ssh. Possible with sftp. Might need to use symlinks as bialix suggested above.
As a newbie to linux stuff I don't understand all implications of running sshd on the server and giving shell access to the developer accounts. Have to use bzr shell limited... documentation is scarce.
Basically, bzr+ssh:// on a Windows server seems to be what installing Subversion on a Windows server was like several years ago - hard. Hopefully it will get better with Bazaar too because I chose it over Mercurial initially.
Is there any way, any free software capable of automatic file upload? Let's say I edit php code on my local computer with my favorite IDE. I won't change my IDE, it's great. I want something that would detect a file is changed in my project directory and upload it with FTP/SFTP onto remote server. That's it - just that simple.
What I've already tried:
FTPDrive + FileSync Eclipse Plugin - it's quite slow, uploads ALL the files way to often, works buggy under Vista and Windows 7.
WinSCP automatic synchronization - bugs again, refuses to upload files randomly. Would be the best if it worked right.
Eclipse's native SFTP support - it's USELESS! You cannot use PDT projects with this feature. PDT without projects is no better than Notepad++.
Aptana FTP feature. It's worse than manual! Gawd, it sucks!
Running my own PHP/MySQL server under windows. First, it took me ages to set it up, then, it didn't work EXACTLY as my production environment - I hadn't been able to test my code correctly.
How it should work? I change file here, and it's uploaded there. It would be best, if it sit quietly in tray and bother me only if upload error occured.
Ok, if it's not free, maybe there's something cheap at least?
If there's nothing like it, is there something like FTPDrive?
rsync does exactly what you're asking.
Well, almost: it doesn't watch your filesystem and automatically upload files - you'd have to set up a task to run it every minute or whatever. But it does efficiently upload only the changes. If you're on Linux, lsyncd does the watching part and drives rsync to do the efficient upload part.
In the rails world, we tend to use source control and a deployment tool like vlad or capistrano. It's a bit safer and more consistent than FTP. This is a guide on how to use it with svn and php http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2006/08/16/automated-php-deployment-with-capistrano/.
You really should try to get your development server running on your personal machine. It's a much better way and it is worth the initial pain of trying to make it work. There are good tutorials on that out there somewhere.
You can use WebDrive or ExpanDrive, mount a complete remote directory as a local disk drive and directly edit your files on the server. However this highly depends on your connection and how your tools are written. Another approach could be to use one of these tools and with another tool sync all the changes asynchronously.
I am developing some Python programs that I'm running on a remote Ubuntu Linux server (hosted on Slicehost). I would like to work on the source in an IDE on my Windows Vista PC, and have all file modifications sent directly to the Linux box without my intervention (i.e. without having to manually SFTP the files each time I change them). What is the very easiest way I can do this?
WinSCP includes a basic remote file editor, though if you want to use a proper IDE for your development this won't be much help.
I'd suggest you run a version control system like subversion, which would allow you to write a post-commit hook to automatically rsync your code the server with each commit.
Use PuTTy and SFTPDrive.
PuTTy is an SSH client, and SFTPDrive ($39 USD) will allow you to mount your remote file system locally as a drive letter.
Install Samba and OpenVPN on the server, and OpenVPN on the client. Setup Samba to share the directory tree you're interested in, and access it over the VPN for security. Perhaps Vista has non-sucky WebDAV support by now, and you could use WebDAV over HTTPS, but it was always crap under XP.
Ben's suggestion of a local dev environment using a VM is also a winner.
You could install cygwin and then have rsync run on cron every minute.
Or you could use Netdrive to access the server via FTP like a local disk:
http://tech.xptechsupport.com/netdrive-turn-your-ftp-into-a-drive-letter.html
Or you may be able to achieve something similar using cygwin and FUSE - you can on linux, but never tried it on cygwin.
Also, would it not be easier to set up a full dev environment locally? Maybe using a virtual machine? It'll be much quicker for testing. And then you can set up a shell script to transfer the current version to the slicehost server.