Migrating data between local and development server

I’ve been working away at a medium-size WordPress site. So far I’ve just been hosting the site on my local machine and showing it to internal consultants over our local network. Things are working well, and now it’s time to show it off to the client. I’ve been using git all along, so pushing it to the dev server was a breeze. I duplicated the local DB and pushed it to the dev server manually, which was fairly easy except that I had to manually change a few URL entries.

Now my question is: what’s the best way to keep two instances of WordPress synced? I still have more work to do locally and the DB is going to need to get pushed up again. How do other people manage this in an automated way?

One thought I had was to write a git hook to pull the MySQL data down when I push from my local machine and have a hook on the other end to import the data when the dev server pulls. However, if I do this I’ll have to worry about changes to the wp_options table.

Does anyone have any strategies for making this sort of thing easy?

Thanks!

Assuming your wp-config.php is already in place and in order:

• Step 1. Mysqldump your development database
• Step 2. Replace all instances of development.domain.com to production.domain.com^^
• Step 3. Login to MySQL, run a SOURCE command to import data e.g. source /path/to/file

^^ How to replace all instances of old domain with new: (1) Copy the script below. (2) chmod +x it. (3) Run it.

Usage: ./script.sh development-dump.sql > production-dump.sql

#!/bin/sed -f
s/'\([^\\']*\)development.domain.com\([^\\']*\)"https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/"\1production.domain.com\2'/g