• 1 Introduction
• 2 Status

You could do the above with a commercial package, such as Microsoft Frontpage, but that's expensive, proprietary, and not as easily automatable as the solution presented here.

The home page synchroniser, hpsync, is a Perl program which can be run whenever you connect your Linux box to the Internet. You tell it where your home page is on your local disk, and it works out (from a configuration file in that directory) what the address of the FTP server is, what your user name and password are, and then starts the update.

hpsync keeps a list of what is on the Demon server - it does not interrogate the remote server every time it connects. When you change a file on your local hard disk, it detects a difference in the list, and what's actually on disk. It then builds a list of files to be uploaded, directories to be created on the remote machine, and obsolete remote files and directories to be deleted.

If any changes are needed, hpsync will connect up to the server, and do the updates by calling the standard FTP program, and chatting to it, much as you might, if you were doing it by hand.

The list on disk is then updated, and the connection closed.

The result is that you only need to change the pages on local disk, and not worry about the upload - it will be taken care of next time you connect.