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Publishing a Website

WebPublish is designed to manage the details associated with publishing a website from a local directory to a remote server using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This allows a website developer to work on the local copy of a website and then use WebPublish to mirror the changes to one or more remote servers.

When WebPublish selects a file for publication, it does not necessarily mean that the file will be transferred. The file will only be transferred to the remote server if one of the following conditions is true: The -force (-f) FLAG was included on the command line; the local copy of the file does not exist on the remote server; or the local copy of the file is newer than the copy on the remote server.

NOTE: Because the system time is not the same on each FTP server, WebPublish may continue to transfer files to the remote server even though the local copy of the file is not newer than the copy on the server, or WebPublish may not transfer files that should be transferred to the server. As the time difference should never be more than a day, this should not be a problem if you only publish a website one or less times a day. A future version of WebPublish will attempt to correct this problem by autodetecting the time difference and saving the difference in the account's database record.

WebPublish needs to know which files should be published. There are three ways to tell WebPublish which files should be published. The first method is to specify each file on the command line. The second method is to include qualifiers on the command line. The third method is to use the touch and find commands.