This is a reprint of a Gold Forums reply on moving Community Server from a development environment to a production environment. Here's an excerpt of the question.
I was wondering if anybody has come up with a *good* way to move work from a development machine to a production machine? For instance, I know I shouldn't copy this up to the production server when I have changes for our site, but this bugaboo seems to get me every time. I punch the "Publish..." button in Visual Studio and it happily copies over the production server web.config. Then I thought, why not use the VS2005 Copy Web option? With this option, I could "unselect" the web.config before punching the copy button. Well, that idea quickly seemed bad because a) I don't want to deploy the CS files, and b) I don't want to deploy the junk content I created during testing. Has anyone come up with a way around these developer headaches?
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This is from my experience doing this a bunch of times...
FTP. FTP. FTP. Don't think about any VS2005 copy or publish options. You've got a development site. FTP it to production.
1) Include the web.config! Once online, pull it down to a temp directory and update the connection string. That's all you need to do.
2) ZIP. ZIP. ZIP. FTPing all of those CS site files is a major pain, so what you want to do is zip up your site by sections, then ftp those zips and unzip them on the server. You're done.
As for the database, that can be exactly the same as development as well, the only thing you'll want to do is add the site domain to the cs_sites table with
insert into cs_sites values ('myCoolSite.com');