Hey web development geeks...does this tool exist?

[MDesigner]

A common environment in web development is having three levels.. development, staging, and live.

Development is obviously where you do your coding and testing.
Staging is where you place the code that's been proven to work so that people can see it, verify it, etc.
Live is, well.. live production site, obviously.

Obviously there are file synchronization tools that let you specify two directories, and then it tells you what files have changed, and lets you compare the two directories, synchronize files so they're copied from one place to another. And some of these are kinda lackluster. What would be really nice is a tool built specifically for web developers that has dev, staging, and live, and lets you easily promote code from one level to another, but only the files that have been modified.

Is there such at tool?

 

[AmigaMan]

have you looked at rsync?

 

[MDesigner]

Oh PS, I should mention.. we're on a WinXP environment.

 

[jkoon]

Well dreamweaver will let you have a development and live server but I?m not sure if you can set it up to have a dev, stage and live servers.

At WVU where I worked as a webmaster we had a dev server where we stored the files, and we then had dreamweaver push the stuff to the staging server (which was downtown at the datacenter) when we wanted to take it ?live?. Then they had some type of automated system that would synch the staging server with the live server approx every 3 hours(actually it removed whatever was on the live server with what was on the satging server). But I?m not sure what software/method they were using to accomplish this.

 

[MDesigner]

You know, now that I think about it... back when I used to work for Fry (major e-commerce developer), we had a system where Visual Source Safe would actually somehow push files from staging to live. Does anyone know how to set up VSS to do this?

 

[spacelord]

I use SyncBack, with some custom profiles I made... to copy from my localhost, the .html, .config, .aspx, .aspc, .dll, etc.. files to a "staging" server.
works fine for what I'm doing.