Synchronizing folders between EC2 linux servers

About Rsync:

Rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files across computer systems, by checking the timestamp and size of files.[3] It is commonly found on Unix-like systems and functions as both a file synchronization and file transfer program. The rsync algorithm is a type of delta encoding, and is used for minimizing network usage. Zlib may be used for additional data compression,[3] and SSH or stunnel can be used for data security.

Rsync is typically used for synchronizing files and directories between two different systems. For example, if the command rsync local-file user@remote-host:remote-file is run, rsync will use SSH to connect as user to remote-host.[4] Once connected, it will invoke the remote host’s rsync and then the two programs will determine what parts of the file need to be transferred over the connection.

Installing Rsync:

For Yum yum install rsync

For Debian / Ubuntu apt-get install rsync

Command:

$ rsync [options] source-path destination-path

Options:

-z, --compress
-n, --dry-run
-q, --quiet
-v, --verbose
-h, --human-readable
-P, --progress
-b, --backup
-u, --update     # skip files newer on dest
-c, --checksum   # skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size
-a, --archive    # archive (-rlptgoD)
-r, --recursive
-l, --links      # copy symlinks as links
-p, --perms      # preserve permissions
-t, --times      # preserve times
-g, --group      # preserve group
-o, --owner      # preserve owner
-D               # --devices --specials
--delete         # Delete extra files
--exclude        # Exclude log/tmp folders etc

A complete command would look like:

$ rsync -avzP — exclude={tmp,.git} -e “ssh -i /Users/miradnan/Downloads/key.pem” ubuntu@172.168.1.1:/var/www/html/my-application /var/www/html/my-application