Web site management and staging using Subversion

[John Peacock <jp...@rowman.com>]

Someone just asked on the dev list about managing web site development 
using Subversion and I sent her to the users list.  It occurred to me it 
would also be a good thing for me to flog my particular solution to this 
problem.

I wrote SVN::Notify::Mirror, which allows me to keep multiple working 
copies, on local and remote machines, automatically synced to changes in 
the repository. The latest version of the module even supports switching 
to a new tag, based on a regex.

It acts as a handler for the fairly magical SVN::Notify by David 
Wheeler, along with the even more magical SVN::Notify::Config by 
Autrijus Tang.

What these modules let me do is have a very simple to understand 
post-commit script that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -MSVN::Notify::Config=$0
--- #YAML:1.0
'':
     PATH: "/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin"
'path/in/repository':
     handler: Mirror
     to: "/path/to/www/htdocs"
'some/other/path/in/repository':
     handler: Mirror
     to: "/path/to/remote/www/htdocs"
     ssh-host: "remote_host"
     ssh-user: "remote_user"
     ssh-tunnel: "10.0.0.2"
     ssh-identity: "/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa"
'some/project/tags':
     handler: Mirror
     to: "/path/to/another/dir"
     tag-regex: "RELEASE-"


For example, the config file above allows me to keep:

    1. The local "test" web server up to date with changes to one path
    2. A remote "test" web server up to date with changes to another 
path (via SSH)
    3. A "production" web server automatically switched to the latest 
"release" tag of the trunk code

Moving a certain selection of files to the production server is as 
simple as making a tag with a particular name (other tags are ignored). 
  The test server is always up to date with trunk (or whatever branch 
you want to designate).

You can get SVN::Notify::Mirror from a CPAN site near you or here:

	http://search.cpan.org/dist/SVN-Notify-Mirror/

It works with Perl (and doesn't require the Perl bindings for the 
moment), but SVN::Notify doesn't currently work on Windows (though David 
is thinking about how to do that).

HTH

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748

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