Question

I have worked within a web development company where we had our local machines, a staging server and a a number of production servers. We worked on macs in perl and used svn to commit to stage, and perl scripts to load to production servers. Now I am working on my own project and would like to find good practices for web development when using shared web hosting and not working from a unix based environment (with all the magic I could do with perl / bash scripting / cron jobs etc)

So my question is given my conditions, which are:

• I am using a single standard shared web hosting from an external provider (with ssh access)
• I am working with at least one other person and intended to use SVN for source control
• I am developing php/mysql under Windows (but using linux is a possibility)

What setup do you suggest for testing, deployment, migration of code/data? I have a xampp server installed on my local machine, but was unsure which methods use to migrate data etc under windows.

Answer 1

I have some PHP personal projects on shared-hosting; here are a couple of thoughts, from what I’m doing on one of those (the one that is the most active, and needs some at least semi-automated synchronization way) :

A few words about my setup :

• Some time ago, I had everything on SVN ; now, I’m using Bazaar ; but the idea is exactly the same (except, with bazaar, I have local history and all that)
• I have an ssh access to the production server, like you do
• I work on Linux exclusively (so, what I do might not be as easy with windows)

Now, How I work :

• Everything that has to be on the production server (source-code, images, …) is committed to SVN/Bazaar/whatever
• I work locally, with Apache/PHP/MySQL (I use a dump of the production DB that I import locally once in a while)
• I am the only one working on that project ; it would probably be OK for a small team of 2/3 developers, but not more.

What I did before :

• I had some PHP script that checked the SVN server for modification between "last revision pushed to production" and HEAD
  • I’m guessing this home-made PHP script looks like the Perl script you are currently using ^^
• That script built a list of directories/files to upload to production
• And uploaded those via FTP access
• This was not very satisfying (there were bugs in my script, I suppose ; I never took time to correct those) ; and forced me to remember the revision number of the time I last pushed to production (well, it was automatically stored in a file by the script, so not that hard ^^ )

What I do now :

• When switching to Bazaar, I didn’t want to rewrite that script, which didn’t work very well anyway
• I have dropped the script totally
• As I have ssh access to the production server, I use rsync to synchronise from my development machine to the production server, when what I have locally is considered stable/production-ready.

A couple of notes about that way of doing things :

• I don’t have a staging server : my local setup is close enough to the production’s one
• Not having a staging server is OK for a simple project with one or two developers
• If I had a staging server, I’d probably go with :
  • do an "svn update" on it when you want to stage
  • when it is OK, launch the rsync command from the staging server (which will ba at the latest "stable" revision, so OK to be pushed to production)
• With a bigger project, with more developers, I would probably not go with that kind of setup ; but I find it quite OK for a (not too big) personal project.

The only thing "special" here, which might be "Linux-oriented" is using rsync ; a quick search seems to indicate there is a rsync executable that can be installed on windows : http://www.itefix.no/i2/node/10650

I’ve never tried it, though.

---

As a sidenote, here’s what my rsync command looks like :

rsync --checksum \
    --ignore-times \
    --human-readable \
    --progress \
    --itemize-changes \
    --archive \
    --recursive \
    --update \
    --verbose \
    --executability \
    --delay-updates \
    --compress --skip-compress=gz/zip/z/rpm/deb/iso/bz2/t[gb]z/7z/mp[34]/mov/avi/ogg/jpg/jpeg/png/gif \
    --exclude-from=/SOME_LOCAL_PATH/ignore-rsync.txt \
    /LOCAL_PATH/ \
    USER@HOST:/REMOTE_PATH/

I’m using private/public keys mechanism, so rsync doesn’t ask for a password, incidentally.

And, of course, I generally use the same command in "dry-run" mode first, to see what is going to be synchronised, with the option "--dry-run"

And the ignore-rsync.txt contains a list of files that I don’t want to be pushed to production :

.svn
cache/cbfeed/*
cache/cbtpl/*
cache/dcstaticcache/*
cache/delicious.cache.html
cache/versions/*

Here, I just prevent cache directories to be pushed to production — seems logical to not send those, as production data is not the same as development data.

(I’m just noticing there’s still the ".svn" in this file… I could remove it, as I don’t use SVN any more for that project ^^ )