complexed setup - first time to version system

[Greg Ward]

On 19 August 2012, Bipul Agarwal said:
> Please forgive me if this is not the right place for my question. 
> 
>  
> 
> We have a comparatively large website and works on a sub-domain and a main
> domain. Also, the website is in Drupal + Core PHP scripts + Two languages
> (templates) + mutiple databases (tens of tables under each database). 

How large? Up to (say) 5,000 files and 100 MB of data, you hardly
notice Mercurial -- it's plenty fast enough. Above that, you notice
things like "hey, checking out 20,000 files takes a minute or two" and
"transferring 500 MB over a slow network takes a while". Another key
metric: size of the largest file. If you have no individual files
larger than 10 MB or so, don't worry about it. Just do the obvious
thing and forget about performance tricks.

> We have recently got the contract to maintain and enhance this website but
> surprisingly there was neither a staging server for it and nor any
> versioning software. This is one of the biggest projects for my small
> company and we have no experience with versioning softwares. 

Yikes. If it wasn't already obvious to you, I suggest that your first
priority should be to get the damn thing under version control and set
up a procedure for development/staging/production. I suggest starting
here:

  https://www.google.com/?q=web+site+version+control+best+practices

> I have gone through several start up guides but would appreciate suggestions
> for best practices - I don't want to mess with the project by experimenting.

The best thing about distributed version control systems is that you
*can* experiment in a local clone. If you screw up, no big deal. Throw
it away, make a new clone, and start over. You might lose an hour or
two of work, but the learning you gain from that is priceless.

And the best thing about using a development/staging/production
workflow for web development... same thing. Screw around on your
development server all you like. If it breaks, try again. No big deal.

> For compatibility reasons, I would prefer to have staging environment on the
> production server itself (may be on a different domain?).

I'm sure there are lots of ways to do that, but that's really a
question about PHP and whatever web server you're using (Apache,
nginx, whatever). This is *not* the right forum. 

Anyways, you didn't really ask any specific questions, so I'm not
surprised you didn't get any replies. First, get the existing site
into a Mercurial repo and then make a clone that's far from
production, so you can play around. Try something and see if it works.
If not, try something else. If you get confused, ask here for help.

       Greg