I'm a first-time XAMPP user and was wondering what is the method of making sure my local test MySQL database is synced with the live remote database. Or, how do I 'push' the local database to the live server?
With HTML files I suppose a FTP program is all I need. But I don't know what to do about the database. Thanks.
Keeping two databases in sync is known as "replication". MySQL supports database replication. In fact one of their use cases seems to match yours pretty well:
Long-distance data distribution - if a branch office would like to work with a copy of your main data, you can use replication to create a local copy of the data for their use without requiring permanent access to the master.
They have a guide for how to set up replication.
There are hundreds of variations to development workflow and what you use should be tailored to what you need and how you work.
XAMPP offers the ability to develop locally. It doesn't provide an ability to push those changes to a live server or sync between the two. Many text editors will provide you with the ability to push changes live (such as Sublime Text 3) or many will use version control software such as Git which caters for multi-collaboration and makes it easy to roll back to previous changes or prevent major issues when making changes to a website. It goes hand in hand with other local development processes though. And then, the likes of Github or Gitlab host your repositories. You can even use deployment software such as deployhq.com to then deploy the code from your repository.
As said, there are countless ways and it is down to you to set up your ideal and preferred development workflow. If it is just you working on your projects, then with XAMPP set up locally, just using a text editor that allows you to upload to the server should suffice for what you need.
