localhost + staging + production environments?

I have a website say www.livesite.com which is currently running. I have been developing a new version of the website on my local machine with http://localhost and then committing my changes with svn to www.testsite.com where I would test the site on the livesite.com server but under another domain (its the same environment as the live site but under a different domain).

Now I am ready to release the new version to livesite.com. Doing it the first time is easy, I could just copy & paste everything from testsite.com to livesite.com (not sure its the best way to do it).

I want to keep testsite.com as a testing site where I would push updates, test them and once satisfied move to livesite.com but I am not sure how to do that after the new site is launched.. I don't think copy pasting the whole directory is the right way of doing it and it will break the operations of current users on the livesite.com.

I also want to keep my svn history on testsite.com. What is the correct way of doing 开发者_运维技巧this with SVN ? Thank you so much!

Other answers mentioning Hudson or Weploy are good. They cover more issues than what follows. That said, the following may be sufficient.

If you feel that's overkill, here's the poor-man's way of doing it with SVN and a little creative sysadminning.

Make your proudction document root a symlink, not an actual directory. Meaning you have something like this:

/var/www/myproject-1-0-0
/var/www/myproject-1-1-0
/var/www/myproject-1-1-1
/var/www/html -> myproject-1-1-1

This means you can check out code onto production (say, myproject-1-1-2) without overwriting stuff being served. Then you can switch codebases near-instantly by doing something like:

$ rm html && ln -s myproject-1-1-2 html

I'd further recommend not doing an svn checkout/svn export of your trunk on the production box. Instead, create a branch ahead of time (name it something like myproject-X-Y-Z). That way if you need to do some very stressful tweaking of production code, you can commit it back to the branch, and merge it back to trunk once the fire is extinguished)

I do this a lot, and it works quite well. However, it has some major drawbacks:

Mainly, you have to handle database migrations, or other upgrade scripts, all by yourself. If you have scripts (plain-old-SQL, or something more involved), you need to think about how best to execute them. Downtime of hopefully-just-a-minute might not be a bad idea. You could keep a "maintenance site" around (/var/www/mainenance), and point the symlink there for a few moments if you needed to.

This method is not nearly as cool as Weploy, for example, but for relatively small projects (running on a single server, with not-huge databases), it's often good enough, and dead simple.

My answer will complicate things a little bit, but here goes:

I would for this type of scenario use Hudson.

Hudson will allow for you to have an auto deploy / clean the current dir out / add new from svn process. You can then worry about development and less about jugling and deploying from one place to another.

The caveat is that you need to learn a little bit on how to setup Hudson and how to make him work for you.

How to get started with PHP for Hudson

I think that should get you on the right track, a bit of work like I said, but pays off later on.

If only the server side code changes, it is possible that you can simply copy the code across and things will be okay. But even there you have to think of possibility of people in mid-interaction. If the client side code changes, especially if you are heavily using ajax, you will have to get the current users to reload their pages. If the database also changes, then you have ensure that no database transactions happen during the time that you are applying the database change scripts.

In all cases, and irrespective of whether you are using any continuous integration tool, I believe it is safest to go for downtime to apply these changes. One of the reasons why people have the "beta" sticker on their sites is so that they can log everyone off and shut them all out to apply changes without notice. As long as they don't do it very frequently they can get away with it too. Once you are out of beta, applying changes becomes a ceremony where you start announcing downtime weeks in advance, then get a window of 30 minutes to a few hours to apply all changes.

For underlying things like patching security flaws in the OS or system software, adding hardware etc, downtime can be avoided if there is load balancing, and the patches are applied one by one.