Question

So I have SVN installed on our web server. The idea is that the working copies are loaded on developer machines and when they commit (conflicts asside) the server executes a post-commit bash.

Repositories are per project based, the idea is that upon post-commit, the bash file needs to force delete the entire project folder and files, and export the updated repo back into the project folder, to keep the website updated via SVN… I know there’s bound to be some disagreements with this method but it works for us… except for ONE thing…

While the server is re-exporting the project, any requests being made to the website raise errors since there’s chunks of files missing… Is there any way to “queue” apache/php while SVN exports, and then “resume” the requests?

The server exports the files pretty quickly but it’s those few millisecs that someone catches the server and raises PHP errors…

Please let me know if there’s a typical method to sort this out…

Thanks

Answer 1

You could minimize the interruption by building the content in a new directory tree and then renamings things. That is, assuming that you content is available under /var/www/myproject, your post-update script would:

• Populate /var/www/myproject.new
• Rename /var/www/myproject to /var/www/myproject.old
• Rename /var/www/myproject.new to /var/www/myproject
• Delete /var/www/myproject.old

While not quite an atomic update, the time required to perform the two renames will be minimal and should greatly improve the situation.