Is this the process from design to test to production?

Question

I have an SVN repository. I design my web application. Someone manually copies the committed files from the repository to a test environment web site, it is tested. If it is good, someone manually copies it from the test site to production site.

Is that how it is "supposed" to be done?

EDIT: What about svn update (I read further). Do I use that instead somewhere in this process? The problem is that I have to sell this to folks that are used to doing things live on the server (me too). Trying to convince someone that this is the wrong way when it has always been that way is difficult but I see that as we are getter larger it will be beneficial. Yes, we know it's not ideal to do it with one copy on the prod server but I'd like to make us more professional on this.

EDIT: I used SVN export to copy from my svn repository to my web server production folders. however, when I did:

svn export --force file:///Library/Subversion/Repository/Project1 /Library/WebServer/Documents/MyProject

It copied over branches, tags, and trunks (and then the code). How do I just get the code? Or should I be using all three like this and point my web server to trunk/index.php?

It's on a mac snow leopard apache2 if that matters.

Answer 1

Actually, the repository->test part could be optimized and automatized. You can set up the "copying" to happen automatically at night, so that the test team comes the next morning and immediately begins their work - without copying stuff around.

Answer 2

Ideally, you'd be using an ANT task, that would do everything for you.

Basically, you'd run this task every time you wanted to move your code between environments.

A good read on ANT deploys: