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Re: Get latest revision number for web app

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2006q2_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: 2006-06-21 12:04:18 CEST

On Jun 21, 2006, at 11:36, Nathan Haigh wrote:

> I am using svn to track changes/version of a web application. I
> would like to be able to dynamically embed the revision number of
> the checkout code into the applications homepage using php. Does
> anyone know if this is possible or how this could be done.
>
> What i have in mind is, that the code is checkout into a web
> directory and i want the apps homepage to display that revision
> number. In the mean time, i will continue updates on a working
> copy, making commits until i make another release of the app and
> check it out to the web directory again. I suppose i could just
> manually edit the file in web directory to display the checkout
> revision number, but this seems quite hacky.

There is this FAQ entry:

http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#version-value-in-source

It's written for C programmers, but the idea is the same for any
language: when you're ready to build or deploy your project, you run
the "svnversion" command over the working copy, and put its output
into a file. You can then read that file from within your application.

Thisolution is ideal for compiled languages like C because such
programmers are already used to having to run a script (the makefile)
to turn their code into something they can run, so this is a great
place to incorporate a call to svnversion. In interpreted languages
like PHP, we don't have to compile, so this may seem a bit unusual to
PHP programmers like us.

In our deployed web sites, we essentially have a working copy on the
production server which we can run "svn up" on when we want to pull
down more-current code from the development server. Instead of
calling "svn up" directly, consider writing a script "svnup.sh" (or
"svnup.php" if you like) which does two things: first, it runs "svn
up" as usual, and second, it runs "svnversion" and puts the result
into a file "revision.txt" in a known location, which your PHP
homepage can read in. Now you just need to train yourself to use your
"svnup.sh" script instead of calling "svn up" yourself.

In case you're thinking of trying to skip the wrapper script by
calling "svnversion" from within the code for your homepage, I'd
advise against that, since that would be much slower than simply
reading in a text file.

In fact, we've cheated a bit in our setup. It's a bit more
complicated than I wrote above. We actually have a working copy of
the last deployed tag of the project, and when we want to pull down a
new release, we switch that working copy to the new tag. Then we
export the working copy to a new directory named just like the tag.
We have a script that automates all this. The trick is that when we
make a new tag, we put the revision number into the tag name -- for
example "1.4-7845". The web site then runs from a directory named
"1.4-7845" and the page that wants to display the revision can simply
extract it from its pathname. I'm not saying this is the best
solution, or even a good one; it's just the compromise I was able to
reach with the other programmers.

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Received on Wed Jun 21 12:06:03 2006

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