I have a few clients who run a separate "marketing" site on shared hosting like Go Daddy or Hostgator. For the "product" site there are great tools for tracking changes and deploying, e.g. git, pull requests, CI servers, capistrano, chef, war files, etc. But what about the shared hosting account? Mostly this is managed by the client themselves via an FTP GUI and Wordpress, but sometimes I'm asked to change something. I'm curious how people deal with this? How do you "scale down"? I can't force these people to use git. My goals are:
- get the whole thing backed up periodically
- track changes
- easily pull/push between my own development copy and production
How are other people handling this?
> get the whole thing backed up periodically
Rsync if you have SSH access. If you have FTP access mirror the remote server X-times per day using the amazing 'lftp'.
> track changes
If you have SSH access, use .git on the shared hosting. If you don't use .git on the mirror (via lftp).
> easily pull/push between my own development copy and production
The mirroring can work both ways, so you just push the changes to the server via lftp when they are ready.
ps. Most people, rely on FTP GUI clients. Some of them (e.g. Transmit on MacOSX) are really, really well made and worth every penny, but the things you can do with lftp[1] are amazing.
[1] http://lftp.yar.ru/lftp-man.html