site deployment

I put up a htaccess file that block all traffic except my own IP, when developing a site from scratch.

When I update a website;
a) small websites: I do it while the site is live, don't really care.
b) big websites: I have another server where I test everything before uploading to the main domain.

I develop in another directory and copy over when I am finished. I put a "site coming soon" message on the main address

Yes you CAN develop at home and deploy a site once finished, it's a little involved:

If your PC is windows, run XAMPP which is a PHP/Apache emulator, it enables you to run PHP and whatever site at home. Alternatively, you could use "virtualbox" software and run "real" Linux from your PC in a virtual box. (This is actually really cool, i have a virtual box here running Centos 5.7 here, which is a 1:1 copy of my real webhost. Here i can experiment with apache, nginx etc.)

Anyway, if you have XAMPP running and your site running locally, i there is a Wordpress plugin "backupbuddy". I used this plugin a lot already to restore/migrate/deploy lots of sites, sometimes hundreds of them based on ONE site which i made "at home".

You would just create a backup of the entire site with backupbuddy, then upload the archive to the remote, real host (empty domain)...and restore the site to the live site with this plugin.

ALTERNATVELY...you can always disallow Google spiders/bots using .htacess on your real, live site..and develop whatever you want on the live site...and then simply "open up" the site once you think it's ready to be indexed and spidered.

Have you tried a simple PHP+MySQL+Apache package like WampServer for Windows?

That is, of course, assuming you're running Windows. I'm sure there are Mac equivalents, and if you were using Linux or something then you'd probably not feel the need to ask this question anyway.

Hey! Thanks for all the info y'all!

@GeorgR - Luckily, I am running XAMPP locally On the Hostgator site, there is the htdocs directory. Would like to place the deployed site there and not directly in the htdocs directory. This is OK too - right?

Above, Wide said:
I saw this online:
.htaccess: Deny From All – Prohibit, Forbid or Restrict Directory Access

- but -

can you provide an example of what you put into your .htaccess file to keep the spiders out?

I also found these online:


How To Move WordPress from Local Server to Live Site

How to transfer wordpress to new domain ( have to listen closely thru the accent )