Synchronizing .PHP Files on Production and Development Servers?

[eluser]JulianM[/eluser]
Sorry , I know this thread is quite old but I just saw it and felt interested to comment how I do this auto deployment for my sites.

In my case SVN is really helpful, or you can do the same with Github I think, but in my case I use to create a mydeploy.php and automate the commit with a post-commit hook. Each time I put *DEPLOY* in the commit description, the hook is activated and run an update in the target site.

I tried to explain this here: http://www.jigniter.com/how-do-i-deploy-...ubversion/

Of course you can also modify this to support multiple targets, for example if you want to run a deploy to a dev environment or a deploy to a production environment, maybe using different keys, *DEPLOY*, *PROD*, etc.

In my case this worked pretty well and saved me lot of time while publishing small changes to my sites. Just a commit with that special message and you'll see the changes published in your live sites. (well, except for database changes, but adding some smarts you can also make this to update.

Hope it helps.
Thanks,

Julian