I knw ftp is used to do this but i need a service or software that pushes the new code to a live website and replaces the old one without the website users knowing.. Sort of the way facebook updates their website

Filezilla

I don't think we have any software like that.

You said it yourself, that's simply what FTP does. Thanks to the nature of the web and web browsing, you have very little to worry about in terms of the website visitor knowing anything. All you have to do is upload any new code to the appropriate folder via FTP and the next time the user reloads the page or visits a new page, they see the changes. That's if you're making front-end changes. If you're making back-end changes then you have even less to worry about, because visitors will never see or know about that.

The only real issue I can conceive of would be if you're making significant changes to your Javascript code and that is what you're pushing through FTP. The site functionality may break, depending on the type of changes you've made to the JS and how it relates to your site's markup. However, it's not that big of a deal. Users will typically just reload the page without thinking much of it. Essentially, you never have to really worry about casual users ever knowing anything at all.

So just use FTP. If you're looking for software, try Filezilla. Or, if you don't need all the functionality that Filezilla gives, simply use the ftp command line tool if you have that.

When I made a research last I saw that services like Deploy, beanstalk can do this and they are not even FTPs.. they call them deployment web services.. they can even upload to Amazon AWS and that's wat I intent to use

teampregar:
I knw ftp is used to do this but i need a service or software that pushes the new code to a live website and replaces the old one without the website users knowing.. Sort of the way facebook updates their website

There are techniques that you can learn - maybe i can even teach you (but definitely not on nairaland => oversabi-people wont let the discussion finish) - that you can do this, without using any additional software.

dhtml18:

There are techniques that you can learn - maybe i can even teach you (but definitely not on nairaland => oversabi-people wont let the discussion finish) - that you can do this, without using any additional software.

Drop ur WhatsApp contact let me add u na, so that u can teach me

Contact me via nairaland pm or www.facebook.com/dhtml5

dhtml18:

There are techniques that you can learn - maybe i can even teach you (but definitely not on nairaland => oversabi-people wont let the discussion finish) - that you can do this, without using any additional software.

Oga dhtml you better start talking here o so me too can tap from it na

The oversabi people will start arguing back and forth, and me i dey tire for that kind thing.

I use git and Bitbucket

dhtml18:
The oversabi people will start arguing back and forth, and me i dey tire for that kind thing.

I get your point jare
...ehn put am for Nairaland then

Let me now answer the thread, the first thing to know is that the task at hand can be accomplished in so many ways but i shall keep it simple:

Objective: You have a website that uses images, javascript and css lots of it.

If you know that you are going to be updating your images very often, then you version them.

Let me explain what i call the versioning technique:
If for example your logo url is example.com/images/logo.png and you want to be able to update your logo like every minute or hour without changing the url. If you upload a new logo to overwrite the former one, browsers that have visited the site recently will take sometime to update their browser cache, so your logo update may not be seen immediately.
So to solve that problem easily, you can add a profix like this: example.com/images/logo.png?ver=1 so that when you update the logo, you increment the version inside your html output to say example.com/images/logo.png?ver=2 (this way browsers will automatically know they have to redownload immediately they see this - so cache is bursted).

This versioning technique also works for javaScript and Css. You first upload the media file to replace the old one in the case of css, js, images and other similar ones. Then you update their versions in your html source code and finally update your html source code.

Now to prevent a breakdown of service, do not use ftp to make these changes because FTP thrashes old files before replacing them, if your website is a very active one, people might experience breakdown of service while ftp is replacing core files.
You can use a zip upload to upload, works best because the old files are replaced very fast and efficiently.


It is possible for you to write a script to automate this kind of task. I had a site that needs constant update like that. Whenever i make those changes, i run a script on my localhost which connects to an api on the live website and uses that API to publish the changes.
I create a zip file containing the folder structure with the file updates, so all my script does is to upload the zip online and extract it.

Any questions? I have tried to summarize it as best as i can.

, all you need is a source control system...
Local machine -- git push --all Remote server -- git pull
It really is elegant... For kicks, automate it with a deployment tool

^^^that is the ultimate solution in this age and time, if you do not wish to do it the manual way - which i have explained. However, like i said earlier, different means exist for doing the same thing depending on situation.

For example, there are times when i am called in to fix the source code of an existing live website - just sharp fix and waka go and i do not have access to source code and all that, in those kind of scenarios, i am denied of my usual tools and need to improvise (in some cases, i am not even allowed to use my pc).

dhtml18:
^^^that is the ultimate solution in this age and time, if you do not wish to do it the manual way - which i have explained. However, like i said earlier, different means exist for doing the same thing depending on situation.

For example, there are times when i am called in to fix the source code of an existing live website - just sharp fix and waka go and i do not have access to source code and all that, in those kind of scenarios, i am denied of my usual tools and need to improvise (in some cases, i am not even allowed to use my pc).

Fix code on live server ke? At the last place I worked we had 3 environments edge, staging and finally live

There are also tools like Capistrano https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano which can help easily reverse from one version of your code to another. But I'm yet to look at it, I just prefer git alone

Djade007:


Fix code on live server ke? At the last place I worked we had 3 environments edge, staging and finally live

Yeah, the quick and dirty way to be used in case of emmergency. If used correctly, works seemlessly.

But the git way is recommended sha.

dhtml18:
Let me now answer the thread, the first thing to know is that the task at hand can be accomplished in so many ways but i shall keep it simple:

Objective: You have a website that uses images, javascript and css lots of it.

If you know that you are going to be updating your images very often, then you version them.

Let me explain what i call the versioning technique:
If for example your logo url is example.com/images/logo.png and you want to be able to update your logo like every minute or hour without changing the url. If you upload a new logo to overwrite the former one, browsers that have visited the site recently will take sometime to update their browser cache, so your logo update may not be seen immediately.
So to solve that problem easily, you can add a profix like this: example.com/images/logo.png?ver=1 so that when you update the logo, you increment the version inside your html output to say example.com/images/logo.png?ver=2 (this way browsers will automatically know they have to redownload immediately they see this - so cache is bursted).

This versioning technique also works for javaScript and Css. You first upload the media file to replace the old one in the case of css, js, images and other similar ones. Then you update their versions in your html source code and finally update your html source code.

Now to prevent a breakdown of service, do not use ftp to make these changes because FTP thrashes old files before replacing them, if your website is a very active one, people might experience breakdown of service while ftp is replacing core files.
You can use a zip upload to upload, works best because the old files are replaced very fast and efficiently.


It is possible for you to write a script to automate this kind of task. I had a site that needs constant update like that. Whenever i make those changes, i run a script on my localhost which connects to an api on the live website and uses that API to publish the changes.
I create a zip file containing the folder structure with the file updates, so all my script does is to upload the zip online and extract it.

Any questions? I have tried to summarize it as best as i can.

Can this versioning work with php ??

teampregar:

Can this versioning work with php ??

It is just a crude and dirty technique and it does work with PHP.

Djade007:
There are also tools like Capistrano https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano which can help easily reverse from one version of your code to another. But I'm yet to look at it, I just prefer git alone

is like this capistrano is written in ruby oh, and i dont understand ruby

dhtml18:

It is just a crude and dirty technique and it does work with PHP.

can u recomend me to any useful version control tutorial?

teampregar:
is like this capistrano is written in ruby oh, and i dont understand ruby

Yh that was just the language it was written with, you would need to install ruby before you can use. It has its own command you will be using

teampregar:
can u recomend me to any useful version control tutorial?

Err, unfortunately no, maybe I will write one, just a lot of stuffs on my table at the moment.

teampregar:
is like this capistrano is written in ruby oh, and i dont understand ruby

This should help http://adelowolanre.com/blog/2016/02/15/deploying-php-web-apps-with-capistrano/

dhtml18:
.....

Mbok no vex, too much grammar dey quick tire me. Can you arrange a wireframe of what you just wrote?

version control. github does this mix it with heroku amongst others. Seem less updates

Visual studio does this....

Get your terminology correct. There is power in how we use words, if we use them the wrong we, we are bound to be confused.

With that said, you don't push codes to a live website.

"code" could be a subset of a computer program, meaning, code is not the only thing a computer program includes, a computer program could have code and in addition to that other artifacts such as templates, style sheets, images, audios, etc.

When a computer program is completed, you most likely want to release everything not just the code, so instead of saying code.

Say computer program, instead of code. A computer program that is designed to run on a web site is called a web application.

So let's correct your sentence. "What softwares are used to push a web application to a live website"

A website is a computer program/application that resides on a machine usually called a server or web server. Pushing codes to website, sounds as if someone logs into their browser and enters code, so let's improve your sentence.

"What softwares are used to push a web application to a web server"

In the sysadmin/development world, when computer programs are transferred to a server for the users to use or the previous program is updated, the word we tend to use is "deploy"

So

What softwares are used for deploying a web application to a web server.

With that said, if you are doing it manually, SFTP or SCP. People will copy the file then place em in the right locations.

Some people have a read only repository account pointing to their repo, then they can login to the server and use SVN or GIT to pull a release.

If you are doing automated deployment, you can use something like Heroku or setup your own using Bamboo, Jenkins (search for continuous deployment software"