How do you do A/B switching in a web app? (for deploying updates)

Question

I currently have a mysite.com (A) which points to /public_html/ and a dev.mysite.com (B) which I created a /dev_html/ for that. I cloned the site but now I need a way of switching between them without having to copy all the files from one dir to another and without bringing the site down. I just want to switch the live site to B and then work on A, and when I finish, switch the live site to A and work on B. Is there a simple way? I'm using cPanel X and cPanel 11 (WHM VPS). Also, both can interact with the same database so that's not an issue as I'm not changing any database structure. Only the php/js/img files need to switch.

Answer 1

Not sure if you have options to map domains, sub domains to folders in CPANEL as Im not a huge cpanel fan. The hosting company that I use allows mapping folders to domains and subdomains that I create so I have two folders too.

One of my folders in v1 and other folder is v2.

I point the live domain to v1 when Im working on enhancements on the version in v2 and point the domain to v2 when I have to do enhancements on v1 (but when switch happens I have to copy the files anyway- the advantage is that the beta website throws errors while Im copying over and not the main website)

Answer 2

vhost file

Edit your vhosts file to point to the other directory.

Currently you will have a container that states that the site files are located at public_html

Change that to dev_html and run the following command to see if it all went ok.

apache configtest

If there are no errors, run

apache restart