How to compare test website and live website

Question

Hi,

We have our production server running our website. Then we have a test server which has exact same data but with changes to code to do some new functionality. This web app has over 500 pages.

Is there any program that can

• Login to the test site
• Crawl through each page and then save the page as html
• Compare with the same page saved with live site?

This way we can make sure that new features that we add to our test site will not break the live site when code updates are applied to production.

I am currently trying to use WinHTTrack website copier and then comparing the test and live folders with some code comparison tool like beyond compare. This works ok but there are lot of files changed because of the domain name changes.

Looking forward to ideas / solutions for this problem.

Regards

Answer 1

use an Offline Downloader, download all files to your computer from both sources, then compare the folder contents using a free tool like Total Commander.

EDIT

Load both of your sources into a CVS, and compare it there.

Answer 2

Apparently you can't make consistent, reproduceable builds in your project, can you? I would recommend moving towards that in the long run, it will save you a lot of headaches. That way you would know exactly what was deployed to which server when, so there would be no more need to bend around backwards to get the deployed sources back like this...

I know this is not a direct solution to your problem... but maybe it is worth comparing, whether you would save more in the long run by investing the efforts into your build process now, instead of implementing this workaround (and then improving your build process anyway - because one day you will almost surely need to do that).

Answer 3

Have you looked at using Watir for this? It's not exactly the thing you are looking for but it might allow you some more granularity in your tests and ensure the site is functionally identical rather than getting caught up on changing guids, timestamps and all the other things that tend to change across any significant size website from day to day as part of it's standard functionality.

Answer 4

wget has a --convert-links option, there are also some options to preserve cookies that might let you do it logged in http://drupal.org/node/118759#comment-664498