Rather basic question about using mercurial in test/production set-up

[Chris Green]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 11:33:21AM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> I use mercurial simply for managing my own (feeble?) coding efforts,
> configuration files, etc.
> 
> Until now I've not needed to separate code I'm testing from what might
> be called 'production' code as buggy code wouldn't lose data or affect
> anyone else.  I just keep testing until the program is bug-free[ish]
> and then it's 'production'.  I.e. my ~/bin directory is in my
> mercurial repository, I check the file out, change it, run it, test it
> until I'm happy with the changes then check it back in.
> 
> 
> However I now have a situation where I do need to keep the testing
> code separate from production as it were.  It's my mail filter program
> which handles all my incoming mail.  Thus I can't just change it and
> have errors in it because I will lose mail.
> 
> I have implemented a 'test site' on a different system but that system
> doesn't have mercurial on it and I only have a user ssh login account.
> I have my domain hosting provider send all my mail both to my home
> system where I 'really' read mail and to the test site so that on the
> test site I can run the same mail filtering as at home and it doesn't
> matter if I break it.
> 
> So how can I manage this?  I need to check files out from a repository
> (which will be on a system on my home LAN) and copy them out to the
> test site.  Then, after modifying and testing, I need to copy the files
> back to the home mercurial repository, check them in and get them into
> their working directories.
> 
> I'm sure there must be pretty standard sequences for doing this, it's
> such a basic requirement, but up until now I haven't really needed to
> do it.  Are there any tutorials for this sort of work sequence?
> 
Update, I do now have mercurial available on the test server, a very
friendly and helpful (non commercial) sysadmin.

So I have cloned my home repository to the test server, what next?

-- 
Chris Green