version control and development

[eluser]bretticus[/eluser]
My work environment is a bit smaller with usually me and one more developer working together. We are "old school" and work via our subversion repositories. We both work off MacBook Pros and use MAMP to closely emulate our LAMP stacked services. Because our projects are typically frequent and smaller (custom programming for customers,) we do not have a staging server as much of the work and debugging is done before the website is ever released to the general public. All testing is done before commiting code (We accomplish this by setting up virtual hosts in MAMP and using /etc/hosts to set the host headers for the local vhost.) We do not use commit hooks, we simply check out a copy for our live website and update the live copy after a commit. This is, perhaps, a bit haphazard, but a very simple way to collaborate on source code and deploy to production.

The reason I posted is that I typically leave some key files out of the respository:

application/config/config.php
application/config/database.php

As these will most likely be different depending form where they are deployed. To make life easier, we create copies of the files:

application/config/config.sample.php
application/config/database.sample.php

and add those the repository so it's easy to just copy the sample and enter the local settings.

That said, I think WanWizard's approach is much better than ours (then again, we're keeping it simple for the reasons aforementioned.)

Good luck!