Development environment - VCS from development to staging server to production

Question

Hi, I've read a number of topics in the same sort of ballpark as this one, but in all honesty I'm still not exactly sure on the best approach (as a starting point). I am a solo developer in a small office and I have around 30 websites which are hosted on a linux VPS. I want to start using using version control (probably SVN) and also set up a staging server. At the moment, I do development either locally on my machine before using FTP to upload to the live server, or ocassionally for small changes I edit the remote files directly, which is not an ideal approach.

I'm looking for some guidance on how to improve my development environment. I imagine I should be installing SVN on the web server, which would then allow me to check out versions to my local machine (which would also require SVN i think). Also, if I want to set up a staging server, should I just set up subdomains for each of the live websites, then use these subdomains for showing clients changes to the site before making them live?

Hope this makes sense!

Answer 1

You can actually install the SVN server on your local machine, which I would recommend in lieu of installing it on the web server (assuming you make backups). The easiest thing to do, since it’s only you using it, would be to use the file:// protocol, but using svnserve is a little more robust, and the preferred method if you want to take the time to do it.

Answer 2

@Michael, I disagree - I would say it's better to install on the linux vps, especially if you are already paying for the hosting service. I find it very helpful to be able to browse and download stuff from my svn repo wherever I am, from whatever computer I'm on.

@nicky, I started with svn (and version control) several years ago and I took baby steps which made it easier to tackle.

If I had to do it over again, I'd read the svn book to start with. The book is very well laid out and didn't take more than 1-2 days to plow thru.

While you're reading, install svn on your linux vps with an apache front end.

Once you have that up, pick one of your websites and import it into svn. This is how I structure my svn repo. For example, say my repo is hosted at http://mysvn.mydomain.com/svn/:

  mywebsite1
     - trunk
     - tags
     - branches 
  mywebsite2
     - trunk
     - tags
     - branches

Don't worry about creating the perfect structure. It's pretty easy to re-organize especially when you're starting out. After you import a few projects into svn, you'll start to get a feel for which projects should have their own "trunk/tags/branches" dir structure and which can be combined.

For creating test environments, I do exactly what you describe. I use build scripts to checkout from svn and download files into dirs that are mapped to subdomains like "test.clientsite.com" (I work primarily in java and use ant and maven, but I think you can use whatever scripting language you're familiar with).

Once you get used to version control, you'll never go back, good luck!

Answer 3

This is what we do at work:

We have a staging server running Apache and a Subversion server. We have a post commit hook that updates a working copy in the htdocs directory, that way, when a developer commits something it automatically gets updated on the staging server, so everyone can see the latest code.

On the client's production servers (the ones we can control) we have the Subversion client installed and the website is a working copy. When we need to update the live site we login to a shell and run svn up. If you do something like this, make sure to limit access to the .svn directories, either with .htaccess files or from the main Apache config.

We have a custom app that manages the projects, but that is only because we're lazy and don't want to setup each project by hand, the app creates the necessary directories and working copies. You could write a quick script to do this.

We never, ever, edit files via FTP on the live site. All in all we have been using this setup for almost 2 years and aside from the occasional conflict on the staging server, we never have had any problems.