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How to do a public (working) version of my app and an 'in development' (private) version?

So I finally got my web app up and running. But now I want to make some enhancements to it. I don't want to be messing with the public-facing code. I think I may have done it, but I'm not sure. And kind of scared about messing up the public web app. For my 'in development' version, I added a second web app, assigned it a different file directory, copied all my existing files into the new file directory (and applicable subdirectories), and then password protected the new web app. It "looks" like this is set up properly as I now seem to have 2 webapps -- one with my public web app name, which seems to be connected to my original source code directory, and one with my generic pythonanywhere name (which is for my 'in development' version) which seems to be connected to the new source code directory. My idea was to change my domain name pointer to my new 'in development' version after it was completed, make it my public version. Did I do this correctly? Is this a sensible way to handle having a public version and an 'in development' version of a web app on pythonanywhere?

Hi there,

I'd suggest you're doing the right thing by having two different web apps working off two different copies of the codebase, so that all sounds good. Your next challenge is to keep the code in sync between the two, and be able to copy code across to live when you've tested it in dev.

Using a version control system would be the classic solution to this. Git, and using Github to push and pull from would be my suggestion.