Deploying CodeIgniter (or any PHP projects) to the live site?

Question

What's the ideal way of deploying CodeIgniter projects (or any PHP projects for that matter) from your local machines to the live site? I've been using subversion for checking out and updating the code from live sites for quite some time now. But there are others who say that this practice is not good since you do not need the svn metadata in the live site. I've also read a couple of articles where they use Capitrano to deploy PHP projects. What's your practice in PHP project deployment?

Answer 1

I use Phing for all my building needs.

I've created several tasks like, prod, staging, debug. When i want to push all data to my production server, i just use phing prod. This will checkout all code from my repo, do some config changes, run all static files like css and javascript through a minifier etc.

More info on Phing here:

Phing.info

http://www.slideshare.net/hozn/phing-building-with-php

Answer 2

I asked a similar question and a lot of people seemed to like Phing:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425692/what-is-your-preferred-php-deployment-strategy

I took a look at it and the config files were pretty intimidating. I'm interested to hear more on this subject.