Question

I currently ftp all my files to my website when i do an update (over a slowish adsl connection)

And I want to make things easier, so I just recently started using a hosted svn service, and i thought i could speed things up a bit by doing an svn export of my website directly onto my webserver

i have tried that a few times and it seems to work ok, however it does fetch the entire site everytime which is a bit slow for a 1 file update

so my questions are

is it possible to do an export and only get the changes since the last export (how will this handle deleted files ?)

OR will it be easier to do an svn checkout and svn update it all the time instead of svn export and just hide the .svn folders using apache htaccess

is this a good idea, or is there a better way to publish my website
i am trying to achieve the 1 click deploy type ideal

maybe there are some gotcha’s i haven’t thought of that someone else has run into

debian/apache/php

Answer 1

I would do an svn checkout, and have done so successfully on a live site for a number of years. You should add mod_rewrite rules to 404 the .svn directories (and files) though.