Cleaning up server side

I just discovered (after too long) that RW is leaving every file it ever uploaded on my server. For some reason I thought it uploaded changed files only. Using Fetch, I cleaned out the whole thing but still finding vestiges of files that should have been gone a while back. I love Rapidweaver and understand why it doesn’t delete anything but having the option would be great. Using mirror in Fetch helps but to keep it in sync with the RW project is taking a lot of time.
Any ideas on a better way for me to keep a tidier RW project on the server will be greatly appreciated.

Hi Tim,

When posts go unanswered it’s often because the post title is unclear. Perhaps you could rephrase?

For myself, when I make major changes to a site — like adding, deleting or moving pages — I will always export the site first, then use Transmit (FTP) to completely clean out the target directory (except for warehousing folders/directories) before uploading the exported site. This way I am assured of a ‘clean install’ and can thereafter republish the site via RapidWeaver without worrying about orphaned files.

Hi Marten,

Thank you for the advice both on the posting and your approach to my issue. That’s what I ended up doing but it also looked like I lost a couple of htaccess files and a Pureftpd file I didn’t recognize but it seemed to break the site.
Does the new htaccess feature in RW8 take care of that perhaps?

Ive had a problem with “left overs” lately.

I transfered to Chillidog for my server and Greg kindly migrated all my sites and email accounts for me.

HOWEVER!!!

I quickly found that there were things on the server that should have been long deleted.
One of which (thanks to Greg is now sorted) caused me no end of bother. It turned out it was an old .php file that was stopping some people from seeing any of my sites. But only some people - not similar machines, not similar browsers, not IP addresses, not operating systems and in different counties!

Marten, I think your solution to keeping a tidy server is great and Im going to adopt that in my practice from now on.

Here! Here! Greg has also come to my rescue more than once in the past year or so. All good!

I’m not sure… I haven’t used it yet. Take care of what exactly?

Would the htaccess feature in RW8 automatically upload/replaced htaccess files deleted by the house cleaning process? At least the ones created in RW in the firsrt place.

No, the htaccess file isn’t uploaded as part of the RW project (as such, however see below). All that RW provides is an easy way of editing the htaccess file. Delete it from the server and it’s gone.

The nice thing about the RW htaccess editor is that it does save old versions of the file along with a comment you can add, so if you were to delete it off the server, although when you then used RW to view the file it wouldn’t be there, I suppose you could then ‘call up’ the previous version(s) of the htaccess file and upload the last one.

2019-02-13_17-41-47

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Very helpful. So the only time it loads is when directed from the htaccess window? Fine.
This forum is working out well. I really appreciate the wealth of knowledge and experience out there

Thanks to all.