[eluser]thurting[/eluser]
I am planning on using SVN for my CI projects and was wondering if anyone had insight on best practices for using SVN to develop websites. I'm thinking my workflow will be as follows:
1. checkout from repo
2. develop locally - test locally
4. commit to trunk
5. update to staging server - test on staging server
5. update/export to production server
Feels alright to me, but I have some questions about config files, databases, and larger binary files.
Regarding config, there will be certain settings that differ between development and production servers (e.g. error_reporting, database). I'm wondering what the best way to handle this issue is. Taking the case of error_reporting, in my trunk/tags I will want this set to 0, but when developing it should be set to a higher level. Should I leave it up to developers to make sure this setting is always set to 0 upon commit? Should I have a development branch with the relevant settings that an administrative user will change upon moving to the trunk/tags? Should I do something else? If I use a staging server I should be able to catch any errors before they go live, but I'd like to minimize issues like this.
Regarding databases, obviously I don't want to work off of the live DB in a dev environment, so how should this be handled? Should I include some .sql files that will quickly build up a dev DB on the dev machine? This seems easiest, but the developer would then also have to go into the DB config file and alter the active group and I would run into the issue described in the paragraph above.
Regarding large binary files (e.g. .mov, .flv), it seems like putting these in the repository would be a bad idea - especially, if I was going to use export to sync my production server. Most of these files probably won't be needed for development, but if some are, where should they be kept? I'm thinking I should just copy those needed to a private dir on my server and allow developers to download directly through ftp.
What do you think?
