I Built a Tool to Detect Files That Differ Between a Remote and Local Server
Overview
I built a tool in Golang that detects information about files that differ between a remote server and a local server.
What This Tool Does, in 3 Lines
- Based on your local workspace, download files from the remote server into the execution directory by specifying a directory and file extensions
- Copy files from the local workspace into the execution directory
- Check for differences between the files obtained in steps 1 and 2
Intended Use Case
- When the synchronization status between a remote file server and your local workspace is unclear
That is the only case.
It rarely happens in a well-maintained deployment environment.
But it happens surprisingly often.
It is cases like these:
- The person in charge left the company and nothing was handed over (>_<)
- It was a small tool, so it wasn’t under Git management (>_<)
- Another vendor has access to the server and sometimes edits it without notice (>_<)
I happened to be assigned to projects that fell into the cases above, and I built this for myself to avoid causing regressions or introducing bugs.
A Note
By default, the target extensions are php, tpl, js, css, and html.
At work I deal with PHP projects a lot, so… m(_ _)m
Afterword
I originally wrote it in Python, but switching to Go improved performance by about 4 to 5 times!
As for concurrency, Python does have multiprocessing, but I felt Go was easier to write.
By the Way
In implementing this, I read the following article.
The basics of Go syntax and environment setup, as well as the semaphore-aware design, were very helpful.
