5 ms·

Back when I was struggling to develop features in overengineered hell, I commented to my friends what a breath of fresh air updating a personal site with scp wa

Back when I was struggling to develop features in overengineered hell, I commented to my friends what a breath of fresh air updating a personal site with scp was. They all gave sighs and shudders of disgust, but then again, they had normal programming jobs, so I suppose it seemed quite backwards to them.

hedora 5y ago
Oh, but scp won’t update it atomically, so you should switch to a scheme that will. Then all you need to do is set cache policies correctly, coordinate with your CDN, and maybe do a staged rollout, just in case. /s Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-)
- zdragnar 5y ago
  You know, I think I might have switched to rsync at one point- I haven't had the site in a few years now, so my memory is a bit hazy. It was sufficiently small enough (no heavy media files) that I didn't mind if I left some unused files up there. Pretty much the only thing that I had to do was make a copy of the sqlite database each time just in case.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    --delete-after will delete files on the destination after everything else has synced so you can be sure you aren't linking to a non-existent asset.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-) Even rsync might not be atomic enough for some situations[1] since it'll update files as it goes rather than in one huge transaction at the end. [1] I worked on the World Cup 2006 site for Yahoo! and we had this issue - solved with 'rsync --link-dest' and swapping symlinks.
  - fctorial 5y ago
    Write a script. 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service
    - zimpenfish 5y ago
      > 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service That assumes you can stop the service which, for many things (like the World Cup website), isn't really possible.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Now you have two problems, because for high availability you need a failover or better yet, shadow secondary service. Hot patching wins, but needs good design to work in the first place.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        You just need to decide how appropriate that is for your situation. As an industry I suspect we tend to over-engineer rather than under. There is a huge spectrum between my single person business with a brochure site and what Google or Apple needs. I'm willing to bet most programmers are working closer to the first than the second.

hedora 5y ago

Oh, but scp won’t update it atomically, so you should switch to a scheme that will. Then all you need to do is set cache policies correctly, coordinate with your CDN, and maybe do a staged rollout, just in case. /s Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-)

zdragnar 5y ago
You know, I think I might have switched to rsync at one point- I haven't had the site in a few years now, so my memory is a bit hazy. It was sufficiently small enough (no heavy media files) that I didn't mind if I left some unused files up there. Pretty much the only thing that I had to do was make a copy of the sqlite database each time just in case.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  --delete-after will delete files on the destination after everything else has synced so you can be sure you aren't linking to a non-existent asset.
zimpenfish 5y ago
> Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-) Even rsync might not be atomic enough for some situations[1] since it'll update files as it goes rather than in one huge transaction at the end. [1] I worked on the World Cup 2006 site for Yahoo! and we had this issue - solved with 'rsync --link-dest' and swapping symlinks.
- fctorial 5y ago
  Write a script. 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service That assumes you can stop the service which, for many things (like the World Cup website), isn't really possible.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Now you have two problems, because for high availability you need a failover or better yet, shadow secondary service. Hot patching wins, but needs good design to work in the first place.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      You just need to decide how appropriate that is for your situation. As an industry I suspect we tend to over-engineer rather than under. There is a huge spectrum between my single person business with a brochure site and what Google or Apple needs. I'm willing to bet most programmers are working closer to the first than the second.