Intranet Website Deployment, is this method sufficient?

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I have now a working Website that I have deployed to the IIS on my local machine using Visual Studio 2013. I can access the website successfully from other machines in my office and in neighboring offices. I have even had others check the access from geographically remote locations, and still been successful. The access method is to put my machine’s IP Address and add the name of the application, ###.###.###.###\name, into the address bar of a browser.

The next step is to promote it to production. We are not using Azure, so the tutorials for promotion to production I have found aren’t useful, nor are we using 3rd party providers.

The method I have conceived is as follows:

  • Have an admin directly login into a company server
    • install the database software
    • install Visual Studio
    • install IIS
    • copy the local machine’s db to the server db
    • copy the locally deployed files to the server
  • admin login into Visual Studio
    • deploy the site on the server in the same way it was deployed on the local machine
  • use the server IP or update the host file on all networked computers to map the IP to an appropriate name (or the local network has a local DNS we can update)

This would allow me a DEV environment (the VS IDE), a TEST env (locally deployed version), and a PROD env (the version deployed on the server).

I don’t see any reasons why this wouldn’t work, maybe a bit tedious, but workable.

Is this method ok? Am I missing anything critical?

Answer

Sounds pretty good but I wouldn’t deploy Visual Studio to a production server. Keep all the development tools off of the server. You can publish your project in Visual Studio and copy the files to the production server. In my company we:

  1. Copy the published Visual Studio project to a folder on the
    production web server
  2. Create the website in IIS on the production server
  3. Copy the database to a folder on the production server
  4. Attach the database in our database system (SQL Server)

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : wolfsshield , Answer Author : FlatFiver

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