bddarwin

After reading a topic on the list here about someone losing their website,
and having a minor mistake on my own that cost me a week's work on a file
(basically, tested the file, then uploaded to the live site and took the
daily backup off the live site.. only to find the file was messed up.. and
had to go to the weekly backup off cd to recover it, losing a week of
work)..

I'm wondering if anybody knows of a version control software program that
may fit my needs.

Basically, I'm looking for something that runs locally, not on the live
site, that I can edit the files on the dev computer, and store old versions
on the dev computer, and then just publish off of the local onto the live
site whenever I need to.

Anybody have any suggestons/ideas on how this should be done, and what
program is a good fit?

Thanks for any help,
Ben

waynnlue

Does subversion meet your needs? You can check out a working copy
that's your dev copy, then check in changes and push to production
whenever you want.

Waynn

nospam

I use SVN for my local development. It is very easy I think. I use
Aptana IDE which has SVN support. I use linux, but I'm sure there is
SVN for winbloze.

-Shawn

gmane

Personally I think subversion is best suited for web projects (which can
have high graphics churn) and git is best suited for code projects
(which have text differences).

I'm really loving git the more I use it for various projects, but I
really don't think I'd be bothered with it's complexity if you are new
to VCS.

Subversion is great. You can can either run a repository locally or
remotely and check out your "working copy" to do the actual changes, and
commit back to the repository when you are done. If you keep your
repository store locally, then make sure you have a good backup policy
there!

Personally, I keep my subversion repository on a central server in the
office. It's connected via a standard ADSL but I can SSH in from the
outside world. Live servers connect directly into it to do their
checkouts for actually running the site. I do this on demand so it
doesn't matter if the office server is offline etc. as I just make sure
it goes online before updating. That way I'll usually have a full local
checkout on my dev machine, the master repository and of course the live
servers. This is quite reassuring from a backup perspective


If you do go for subversion, I can recommend Trac as an excellent web
based frontend to the repository to allow you to view it nicely. It also
has a wiki for keeping notes and a ticketing system; with a few plugins
I wrote (WorkLogPlugin, ClientsPlugin) it is ideal for tracking time
spent on various tasks for various clients in order ot issue invoices etc.

As for frontends, on Winblows, Tortoise SVN is the defacto one, but if
you use Eclipse there are a few options there (Subclipse and Subversive)
too.

HTHs

Col

rosko

A couple of very easy-to-use ones are Subversion and CVS. Both are very
easy to use from a shell / command line, and both have nice GUIs
available for both Windows and *nix. Many editors and IDEs will work
with CVS directly, and some with Subversion.

I chose Subversion because I was trying to move SWMBO off Windows onto
Linux, and the GUIs for Subversion were similar enough and simple enough
on both (TortoiseSVN on Windows, RapidSVN on Linux). Subversion has some
nice options for setting up network servers if you need to go down that
path too (although you probably would get by nicely using local file
storage).

Under Windows, TortoiseSVN comes with a pretty good diff / merge tool
built-in. Under Linux, you'll want to grab Meld.

If you're doing website development by yourself with no self-built
common code libraries (or frameworks!) then you probably won't even need
to worry about stuff like branching. If you have set up some common code
libraries, then it's a good idea to look at branching so that you can
support older sites on older versions of the libraries whilst further
developing them for newer sites.

http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/
http://meld.sourceforge.net/

Of course, a good IT professional would probably tell you to use git,
with its 132-odd shell commands...
--
Ross McKay, Toronto, NSW Australia
"And don't forget ladies and gentlemen
you have to buy this new thing that you don't have
and if you have it
well actually
the new better version of the thing that you have
well it just came out" - Jackson Jackson

robert

While I currently use CVS, I probably wouldn't choose it going forward
since Subversion solves many of the problems it has... as does GIT if I
recall. I'm still using CVS because it works for me and I haven't
allocated the time yet to switch over.

Cheers,
Rob.
--
http://www.interjinn.com
Application and Templating Framework for PHP

gmane

Yeah I agree here. I wouldn't use CVS on any new project.

For me the choices are simple: Git or SVN. Which one would depend on the
kind of project (binary data?) and the team size/independent working
requirements.

Col

bddarwin

Thanks everyone for the opinions. I'm looking into Subversion and GIT, and
hopfully installating one (or both) to test later today.

--Ben

tmboyd1

the


old


Having never used a revision-control solution in the past, I installed
TortoiseSVN and the associated SVN Server (local-only) found on
www.tigris.org . I've gotta say... it's been a breeze to setup (I used
the SVN "1-Click Setup" installer), and I've already migrated several of
the projects I'm working on to the repository and tested extractions and
versioning. Pretty slick!

I can't speak for GIT... but if it's mostly command line, with 130+
switches, I think I'll pass.


Todd Boyd
Web Programmer

gmane

Indeed. Glad it's working for you! Don't forget to backup the repository regularly tho'!

As I posted before, I would tend to prefer SVN for web project that
include graphical churn. With git it keeps a full clone of the
repository locally and thus if you've changed some large images a lot in
your version history, that's a whole lot of data to keep on your local
machine. With subversion it will store a little over double the data it
needs to with a checkout. This is to allow offline diff'ing and
reverting if you have a remote server.

Personally, for me at least, SVN is much simpler and the SVN Book over
at red bean is well worth a couple of hours of reading.
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

Git is great and I do love it for distributed code projects with lots of
authors. But the learning curve is very steep and I still don't consider
myself competent, let alone and expert at git, whereas I know svn inside
out!

Have fun.

Col