I’m a freelancer and prefer working on large projects all by my own self.
Till now, I’ve been using FileZilla to upload the projects I work and after discovering bugs, I used to edit the file with FileZilla.
I wish to use SVN ( or GIT? is it better for this particular scenario? ) to develop and deploy my projects or push the bug fixes as I discover them.
I don’t have much experience using SVN but I have used it as I have contributed to the core WordPress development a bit. Recently, I launched a site and it is fairly popular now. I use the Ctrl+S and F5 strategy for my development. I want to get a bit more professionalized.
How do I setup local SVN, Eclipse and the production web server to use SVN with? Any link to a good tutorial would be greatly helpful.
If you’re not familiar with revision control systems, I suggest you start with Subversion to learn the basic concepts and get used to the workflow. Git is very powerful but can be a bit daunting at first if you’ve never worked with a SCM tool before.
The easiest way to get a SVN repository running is using Apache to access the repository via http or https. You can find tutorials all over the web about setting up Apache + SVN (examples here and here).
Once your repository is working, any decent IDE will easily let you link your project to SVN and you can start checking out, committing, branching, etc.
Regarding deployment using SVN, a common strategy for projects that don’t need compiled binaries (eg. PHP) is to tag a specific revision with a specific tag, for example RELEASE_2011_06_03, and then check out that specific tag in the production web server. When you’re ready for a new release, you tag again and update the production server to the new release tag. By keeping the ‘live’ code linked to SVN you can easily deploy new versions or rollback to older versions automagically.