Rsync
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About rsync
rsync is a fast and versatile file copying/syncing tool. In the context of a webhost, it is particularly useful for both backing up your hosted content to a local (or another remote) drive, as well as for pushing your local content up to the webhost.
This page will focus on the common use case of pushing locally-changed files up to the webhost. See Rsync Backup for the opposite case of pulling from the webhost.
Using rsync to publish your files
rsync is particularly well suited to quickly publishing your changes to your webhost, since it is smart enough to determine which files have changed, and upload only the changes, which makes the whole "publish" operation extremely fast.
It is also possible to set filters for which files it will include and which it will ignore, which makes it possible to have a completely automated one-step setup, once your filters are in place (and once you set up ssh key authentication, so that you don't have to enter your password every time).
In the simplest case, without any filters, here's what an rsync "push out to webhost" command would look like:
rsync -e ssh -av local_directory username@server.dreamhost.com:remote_directory
where
- username is your shell username.
- server is the name of the machine which hosts your shell account. (eg. jezebel, cortes, etc.)
- local_directory is the local directory in which you store the local copy of your content
- remote_directory is the directory on the server that you wish to push to.
To avoid any mishaps, it is recommended to use the full path for both local and remote directories.
To add some filters, the easiest thing to do is to just throw them into the commandline. So, for example, you might do the following:
rsync --filter '- *.pyc' --filter '- /.git' -e ssh -av local_directory username@server.dreamhost.com:remote_directory
the above would ignore any *.pyc files (compiled python files), as well as the .git directory (used by Git to store the code history).
For some more explanation about commonly-used rsync options, see the Rsync Backup page. For fine detail about all features of rsync, see the rsync man page.
Note: the rsync backup and rsync publish (this page) should probably be merged into a general 'rsync' page, since there's a lot of overlap in the content
