At work, we have a windows server 2003 with IIS and Subversion installed. We use it to publish and test locally our ASP.NET websites. Every programmer has Tortoise installed on his PC and can update/commit content to the server. Hosting the repositories is working fine. But the files kept in those repositories needs then to be copied to our local IIS (virtual directories).
What is an easy way to publish those subversion repositories to our local IIS?
Edit:
Thanks to puetzk I added a simple bat file that gets executed every time a commit occurs (check the subversion documentation about hooks). My bat file only contains:
echo off setlocal :: Localize the working copy where IIS points) pushd E:\wwwroot\yourapp\trunk :: Update your working copy svn update endlocal exit
Just keep the web server’s file area as a working copy, and perform an svn up in it whenever you want to ‘publish’. Configure it to hide the contents of the .svn folders if they seem untidy to you (I don’t specifically know how to do this, but I assume it can be done). They will already have the filesystem hidden bit, which may take care of this.
If you want it really automatic (updates as soon as someone commits), use a post-commit hook script on the SVN server to kick off the first process.
Others in the comments have suggested using export instead of checkout. That can work too, and avoids the .svn clutter, but has two drawbacks. One, it has to redownload the entire contents every time, not just the modified files (since it didn’t keep the .svn dir to remember what it has). If you have a lot of files, this will be much slower. Two, update replaces the file atomically (writes the new version in .svn/tmp, then moves it into place). Export writes the file gradually into it’s destination as it downloads. That means export could deliver an incomplete file to someone who browsed it at just the wrong time.