I'm trying to "get religion" about the best practices for
managing a large (i.e., many thousands of files) website with
SVN in a staging->production environment, and would like to get
feedback from you fine folks on this list.
The idea is to have the entire contents of the website in a
repository, and have a script periodically run "svn update"
under the DocumentRoot of the website to incorporate the latest
changes into what Apache serves. About twenty people will be
using Windows and Tortoise/SVN to check out files from the
repository, edit them on their PCs, and commit them back to the
repository. A few seconds later they'll view their updated
file(s) on the web (where Apache has found the recently update'd
files thanks to the "svn update"). So far so good.
The thing is, we want to have a "staging" (or "development")
website and a "production" website. Ideally, after they're
satisfied with the way their changes look in the "staging"
website, users would somehow indicate that those files should be
propagated to the "production" website. (There would be a
similar script doing "svn update" under the "production"
website's DocumentRoot.) I know that this is how one does
things in a traditional software development environment with
longer development cycles, but in this case different people
will be making changes to files all the time, and have to
incorporate them into the "production" website. We don't want
users logging in to the server, or set up individual
"development" environments for each one, or anything like that;
we want them to check out to their PC (via Tortoise/SVN) and
edit locally, then commit back.
Branching doesn't make sense because many files are being edited
all the time by different people; Tags don't seem to make sense
to me because I can't figure out how to "svn update" based on a
tag value (and tags don't have a sense of history so how would
one deal with continually toggling a "production" tag value?).
I'm fairly sure many of you out there are running environments
similar to the one I'm describing, and I'd like to know what's
the best way to go. Thanks very much in advance.
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Received on Tue Dec 14 21:39:52 2004