What's the proper way to sync files across local and development environments?

Posted by haddock420@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 3 comments

I run a website that finds deals on eBay. The backend is mostly scripts that pull data from APIs (listings from eBay and prices from Pricecharting) and the frontend is a flask app and a flask script for the main webpage. It seems necessary to have slight difference between my local environment and the dev environment even if the code functions the same. For example, I run the flask app directly on my local PC so I have to have a line of code to run the flask server on my local PC, but this line doesn't need to be there on my linux dev server because it's run through a gunicorn service. Another example is the directories are different for my local PC and the server so I have to change the hardcoded directory path. There are a few more examples like this. How I handle it now is I've got a script that pushes the local files to the server and a script that pulls the server files to my local PC. The script automatically changes lines where they need to be changed, commenting out the line to run the flask app, replacing the directory name, etc. This works fine and I can easily sync my environments with this, but it seems a very amateurish and hacky way to do it. What's the proper method that I should be using for syncing environments?

3 Comments

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guitarman201@reddit

Maybe I get your post wrong, but I think solution is that there should be no syncing like this. For example you are mentioning few lines of code that varies in dev and prod env, different file paths etc. These should be configurable per env, paths seems to me are things to place in env config files (like dev.yml, prod.yml, etc). Even code execution could be configurable, if piece of code need to run only on specific env, your script should/could know on which env it runs and act accordingly...

ValentineBlacker@reddit

Stuff like the file paths and optional line are usually handled through environment variables. You would, for example, set the correct file path as an environment variable and tell the code to look for it and pull it in when it runs. That way the code can be the same everywhere and the only thing that changes are these variables. And you can set the env vars as part of a startup script if you want. Moving the code itself around is usually done with version control (eg git) and a remote git server (eg Github, Gitlab). Makes it easy to pull in code changes with a few easy commands, once you understand it. You can also run a local git server if you really want to.

grantrules@reddit

Don't hard code things, use config files. You can have a config file for dev and production. Personally, I'd look into docker.

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3 Comments