For deploying generated content to the live system, FirstSpirit offers a "complete alignment" option.
This method creates a data set on the web server which is completely identical to the generation status. This means that files which are no longer available on the development server are also deleted on the web server, new files are copied, and old, already existing files are overwritten by the new ones.
It is however quite common that there are additional files on the live server which belong to the entire website, but were not created by FirstSpirit. In this case these files should not be deleted by FirstSpirit when running a "complete alignment" deployment. How can this be achieved?
Well, it is not a problem to have any additional files on the live system, it is only important to have them separated from the files which are managed by FirstSpirit.
Example (live server directory):
/
--/fs_content/*
--/other_content/*
All files beneath the fs_content directory will be updated when running a complete alignment deployment. This means that files which are not present in FirstSpirit will be deleted from this directory!
But all files from other sources (here beneath "other_content") won't be affected at all.