Managing your web site with Mercurial

I use the Mercurial source control system for (nearly) every one of my free software projects. Recently, I began using it to manage all of my web sites. If you are like me, you likely have a web server and SQL server of some sort running on your desktop, permitting you to work locally.

I make many frequent changes to my sites. Sometimes things don't go so well for various reasons. I may need to roll back changes that I made to something, get my site mirrored in a hurry if its getting an abnormal amount of visits, change hosts in a hurry, lots of other things. Mercurial helps with everything.

Now I can work locally and just 'hg push' my changes to my server, make changes on the server and easily 'hg pull' them to my local copy, or merge if I've modified the same files in both places. I can quickly grab a whole copy of my web site to setup a mirror on many other systems, or even quickly produce patches to send upstream to free software projects (like Wordpress, phpbb, etc).

All of this is done easily, effortlessly and securely via SSH. No more FTP'ing for me! Here's how I do it, you might like this method (or something similar).

Questions or comments regarding this tutorial can be sent to tinkertim@gmail.com, please allow a few days for a response.

Tutorial Objectives

• Install and configure Mercurial
• Move your web site files into Mercurial management
• Protect Mercurial's .hg directory from public access using .htaccess rules
• Commit, push and track changes to your web site
• Keep your local copy in sync with remote changes

Read more: Tim Post

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