CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010mercurialtortoisehgbitbucket
Carl
Carl

Reputation: 1276

Setting up BitBucket and Mercurial for Use In a Group Environment

My company is currently implementing a versioning system using Mercurial and BitBucket. We currently have respositories set up on bitbucket and are able to use them, but our work processes for doing so are a bit clunky. We use Visual Studio for web programming in .Net. Currently, we have set up a cloned repository locally and work from there. We can do this using Visual Studio with VisualHg.

In order to edit files we open them in Visual Studio from the local repository and make our edits. We then commit our changes to Hg, which updates the repository as it should. Then we need to FTP the files from our local system to the DEV server for testing and then FTP again to the Production server once QA is completed and approved.

It would help streamline things if we could have the BitBucket repository synced with our DEV server so that all that was required is to commit changes for testing in DEV, bypassing the otherwise necessary step of locating and FTP'ing all relevant files.

Does anyone know if this is possible? If so, can you point me to any documentation that would show me how to set this up? Our developers would be eternally grateful. Thanks for your time.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 957

Answers (1)

Steve Kaye
Steve Kaye

Reputation: 6262

In my opinion, using Mercurial is not the correct solution for this problem.

The main reason for it not being the correct solution is that the files that are in Mercurial are not the files that you want on the production server and so aren't the files that you want to use on your development server (because you want the QA environment to be as close to the production environment as possible). There are no assembly files stored in Mercurial (or there shouldn't be) and those are the files that the server should be using to run the application.

There are deployment tools built into Visual Studio that you can use for this task. They can be configured to upload all the necessary files with one button click.

Scott Hanselman has a post on his blog about this.

Troy Hunt takes it one step further by introducing a build server with this excellent set of posts. It uses Subversion as the repository but it can be done using Mercurial too.

I prefer the build server method as, once you have it set up correctly, it makes it 100% reliable. It will do the same thing every time you ask it to do the deployment. If you use Visual Studio to do it the developer doing the publish could choose different options and get it wrong.

Upvotes: 4

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