php, user-uploaded files, version control, and website deployment

Question

I have a website that I regularly update the code to. I keep it in version control. When I want to deploy a new version of the site, I do an export and then symlink the served directory name to the directory of the deployment.

There is a place where users can upload files, and I noticed once that, after I had deployed a new version, the user files were gone! Of course, I hadn't added them to the repository, and since the served site was from an export, they weren't uploaded into a version-controlled directory anyways.

PHP doesn't yet have integrated svn functionality, so I couldn't do much programmatically to user uploaded files. My solution was to create an additional website, files.website.com, which sits in a parallel directory to the served website, and is served out of a directory that is under version control. That way they don't get obliterated when I do an upgrade to the website. From time to time, I manually add uploaded files to the svn project, deleted user-deleted ones, and commit the new version. I'm working on a shell script to run from cron to do this, but it isn't my forte, so it's on the backburner as it's not a pressing need.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

I usually dont keep user generated data/file in svn. only the code, db schema/test data. What i usually do to deploy is an rsync from an up to date working copy which excludes the upload dir and .svn dirs. IMO content should be handled by more traditional filesystem/db backup mechanisms and not version control.

EDIT:

Just to be clear your symlinking strategy seems like a good practice. youre jsut missing the backup part it think. Id probably just tar | gzip the uploaded stuff in the cron job instead of interacting with SVN. And then probably have a seperate one to use mysqldump to dump the db and gzip that as well.

Answer 2

I would continue with the practice of exporting the site as upgrades are needed but have a symbolic link to a directory outside of the version controlled directory with the user uploaded content. This way when you do an export you only need to recreate the symlink if it gets blown away. You should then of course be backing up that user content as needed.

Answer 3

Rather than manually doing the export and managing symlinks, you could make your deployment directory a subversion checkout (from a production branch). That way, deploying is as simple as checking in your updates to the production branch.

This works as long as you have sufficient control of your subversion server and hosting setup, and your subversion repository is "ready to run." In this situation, your user directory could be an empty placeholder in subversion and would be left alone by the update process that runs on commit (business as usual for svn update). I'd still recommend (as mentioned by @Flash84x and @prodigitalson) a separate process to back up the user content.

There's an Ars Technica article with a description of how to set this up.

Update: If you follow this approach, make sure that your web server does not allow access to the .svn files in the deployment checkout.