Moving a FrontPage Web site to a non-FrontPage Web site

For a web application I am working on, there are two Web sites – a development site and a production site. Both reside on the same server. Development is done using Microsoft Visual InterDev, so to connect to the development site, I have FrontPage extensions installed. (I also integrate with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, but that’s meaningless to this discussion.)

Moving files from the development environment to the production environment usually entails manual copying, because I do not have FrontPage extensions installed on the production site (for obvious reasons; I don’t really need them!). I finally found a way to do it – the “old-fashioned” way – using a simple command: XCOPY.

XCOPY, which has been a part of Microsoft’s command shell (also known as DOS prompt) for years, copies files from a source to a destination with a wealth of options – most important for me, the ability to copy changed files only and to exclude files and folders.

First, you need an exclusions file – essentially a list of file name patterns (not wildcards). If a file or folder matches any pattern in the exclude file, it is skipped. Here’s my exclude file – which I named exclude.txt:

\temp\
\aspnet_client\
.vss
_vti
.scc

I’m telling XCOPY to skip the \temp\ and \aspnet_client\ folders, and skip any files that have .vss, .scc, or _vti in the filename. This ensures that unnecessary files are not copied to the production Web site.

The XCOPY command to run, which should work in Windows 2000 or Windows XP (not sure if Windows NT 4.0 supports all the XCOPY extensions here) is:

xcopy e:\devsite\*.* e:\website\ /D /P /E /V /R /-Y /EXCLUDE:exclude.txt

For you to use this, just change the source and destination paths, and viola! Dump this line into a batch file (call it dev2prod.bat) and make sure the exclude.txt file is in the same folder as the batch file.

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