How do you update your web application on the server?

Question

I am aware of Capistrano but it is a bit too heavyweight for me. Personally I set up two Mercurial repositories, one on the production server and another on my local dev machine. Regularly, when a new feature is ready, I push changes from repository on my local machine to repository on the server, then update on the server. This is pretty simple and quick way to keep files in sync on several computers, but does not help to update database.

What is your solution to the problem?

Answer 1

I used to use git push to publish to my web server but lately I've just been using rsync. I try to make my site as agnostic about where it's running as possible (using relative paths, etc) and so far it's worked pretty well. The only challenge is keeping databases in sync, and for that I usually use the production database as the master and make regular backups and imports into my testing database.