Staging environments via Linode are awesome!
This weekend I wanted to upgrade my Linode server from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 and also to upgrade my Trac server to version 0.11. Now the quickest method would have been to just change the /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to hardy and do a sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and then download the latest version of Trac. But not knowing if my sites would still be running combined with the fact I wasn’t quite happy with the way I had set things up originally, I decided to buy another Linode server and set up a staging environment.
Honestly, it wasn’t hard at all! Once I installed 8.04 fresh on the stage server, I installed apache, mysql, php, trac, subversion, and other necessary packages, set it up as if it was my primary server (creating aliases like stage.stevenkuhn.net where I could see how it looked), and then copied the new disk image back to the old server. Once there I restarted the old server with the new disk image and since all my original domains still pointed to my production server, I had a very limited downtime. When I was finished, I canceled my second server and received a pro-rated created. I spent less than $2 for having a limited-time staging environment! Linode is the best!
