I’d gotten very used to editing some of my sites on the live running copy or editing a testbed server, then rsyncing it to the live server. I really had the WinSCP+TextPad thing down, then moved to Transmit+KomodoEdit when I went Mac-only for programming. It wasn’t bad at all, though every once in a while I really wished I could do one of those “search every file” actions from the editors, but that’s just not possible when editing one file at a time as a temporary copy via SFTP.
At the moment, I’m just starting to dig into one of the larger web projects I’ve done, migrating a large, data-driven site from PHP4 to PHP5, moving it from a commercial host to my own hosting, and rewriting large swaths of code—all at once. The previous webmaster, who wrote the original code, said he’d used subversion to deal with making revisions and having the ability to roll back when things broke, so I decided to look into subversion.
While most of the documentation made it seem really complex, once I’d settled on https access (apache mod_dav_svn), in the context of an existing SSL site I had, things were very easy–just a few svnadmin commands to set up the directories and a few lines of tweaking in an apache config file. About 10 minutes into playing with the repository, having imported the existing site and set up a working copy on my local machine, I wondered if there weren’t some nice GUI way to deal with checkout/checkin/status/etc. Enter svnX.
Now I’ve got working copies on my desktop and laptop as well as a copy checked out to the new production server and I can easily edit locally, even searching all files (that makes it a lot easier to fix all the instances of some incompatibility with PHP5 or some assumption about the directory structure or other oddity). Once I’ve edited, I can easily check what’s been revised (status) and save the changes to the repository (checkin/commit) using svnX. A quick “svn up” on the server and everything’s live.
This setup is so wonderfully easy that I’m annoyed I didn’t know to do it sooner.
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