Coredump

Here at my new workplace, there are more than 20 web apps that are being developed in-house. They go through the following workflow: devs use development and staging servers for tests, and after QA, the new builds are pushed to the production servers.

They’ve employed a custom version control system for coding, but it’s not panning out. They need an automated way of pushing updates to the dev and staging servers for a quicker turn-around time.

Enter Subversion. I’ve used Subversion both in production and in personal projects. (I haven’t used CVS so I can’t compare the two.) The way I see it, the web apps can be pushed this way:

1. Install SVN with WebDAV support.
2. Create the repositories’ directory trees:

   mkdir /path/to/repository/projectname

3. Note that the repositories have to be owned and writeable by the httpd user:

   chown -R httpd:httpd /path/to/repository/projectname; \\
   chmod g+s /path/to/repository/projectname

4. Create the SVN repositories:

   svnadmin create /path/to/repository/projectname

5. Import the current working directories for the projects:

   svn import /path/to/working/project/dir \\
   file:///path/to/repository/projectname

6. Remove the working directories (backup first):

   rm -rf /path/to/working/project/dir

7. Check out directory trees from the repo:

   svn co file:///path/to/repository/projectname

8. Edit and commit changes:

   svn ci

9. Or, pull changes:

   svn update /path/to/working/project/dir

Easy so far. I’ve also added an HTTP URL for the SVN repos using Apache’s WebDAV extensions. In httpd.conf, just add the following:

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
<Location /repos>
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath /path/to/repo/root
</Location>

Restart the service. Now the repo can be accessed via http://reposerver/repos/projectname.

But I hit a snag: I can’t get the post-commit hook to run on commits! I’m leaning on problems with the permissions, but it’s eluding me right now. *sigh*

Read more:

• Adding SVN keyword expansion in Tortoise SVN
• Raring for Web 2.0
• Quickies
• More web woes
• There must be something to Web 2.0…