YoungPups has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Perhaps not quite perlish enough, but if not...

My previous job was with a fairly small company, and we did all our development on our running production box. I'm now working for a large company where we actually have a development/test box and a production box. What I'm interested in is a utility to compare files on the development box to those on the production box. This would have to include perl modules, cgi scripts, html, etc.

Right now, we just FTP files over from the development box when we're through with testing. There has to be a better way... (Unfortunately, NFS is out of the question.) I'm leaning towards writing my own system, but I'd hate to reinvent the wheel... Has anyone had any experience with a system like this?
  • Comment on Syncing a development and production server...

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Re: Syncing a development and production server...
by Masem (Monsignor) on May 16, 2001 at 18:17 UTC
    CVS, specially, running the CVS server on the dev machine, and invoking the CVS client on the production box. Sure, it might be overkill, but not only do you get to do what you want, but you also get a code repository and the ability to develop on several boxes if possible.
    Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
      One does not need to use CVS for version control. I used RCS and RCS.pm last year. I found RCS.pm to be very reliable even though it is several years old and only has a version number of 0.09. RCS.pm allowed me to use Perl to script various repetitive changes to the controlled files.

      But I wonder whether version control is a complete answer for two files which have not previously been under version control and so may no longer be n'sync. Rather than saying "bye, bye, bye" to one of the two files I would use diff or a similar file compare utility to actually look at the two files. Then after unifying any unwanted forks in the development path I would put the whole shmear under version control.

Re (tilly) 1: Syncing a development and production server...
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 16, 2001 at 18:42 UTC
    For development code, version control is definitely The Right Answer. For data files look at rsync.