Question

I am creating my first website that I am taking live soon. It is a big application that I hope goes somewhere eventually but I will be working on it while it is actually up on the web. I want to do it the right way and set up everything efficiently. It is very difficult to actually gain knowledge on how to go about doing this from a book or even the web.

Firstly, I’ve been doing a lot of research about SVN and although I am currently the only one working on the site I would like the ability to add more people to the project eventually. I know that you have to create a repository for the SVN where your project will actually reside in, and that there are some places that offer it for free like Codesion. I have a good understanding of how it works.

I would like a dev. subdomain for the current website so that I can test and work on everything that I am developing on and that SVN would commit to. How is it that your SVN repository communicates and uploads files to that subdomain? Is this even how you would go about doing this? How would I go about managing all the different databases for each domain?

When I am done updating several changes to my new rollout do I just manually upload all the files to the live site? I am very noob on the process for all this stuff and it is difficult to find information on it. What is the best practice for rolling out new updates? Are there any other different mechanisms or applications that I would need to know about for maintaining my website as it grows?

Please, any help in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It depends on how much control you have over your Web server.

Most (IMO) people push their files up to the server through something like FTP/SFTP. Many SVN hosting services offer this as a ‘deployment’ service. You should absolutely use this option if you don’t have shell access or anything of that nature.

Personally, I prefer to have finer levels of control, and let the Web server do the pulling. Using a system with a full SSH access, you can just have the server do a checkout of the code:

 svn co http://server/project/trunk --username foo --password bar

If you want ease of use (mixed with potential control levels), you can also create a PHP administration class to do this for you.

<?php
echo `svn co http://server/project/trunk --username foo --password bar --non-interactive`;

And often enough, I build a bridged solution. You can create post-commit hooks and set things up such that the SVN server reach out to a specified URL with the comment. The client server then checks the comment and performs actions based on the comment (it might ignore anything without the tag ‘AUTODEPLOY‘ for instance).

There is also GIT (which you should be able to do similar things with), but I haven’t had blow up my current processes (and hundreds of SVN repos) in order to go there yet.