Now that MacServ has been deployed keeping development and production copies of the code synchronised has become an issue. The app is still very much a work in progress, with daily requests for fixes & tweaks from the technicians using it and instead of keeping track of modified files and then manually updating them via scp, I decided to let laziness motivate me to utilise a less painful system.

I spent a bit of time researching the use of rsync but decided that subversion would better suit my needs. I started by adding a new user and creating a directory for my repository:

$ su

adduser svn

…

su svn

$ cd ~ $ mkdir repo

Next was to create the repository and make it writable by all accounts in the users group:

$ svnadmin create repo/ $ chmod -R g+w repo/

Just to be awkward, I decided on having multiple access methods to the repository. For local access I added a username & password for myself into repo/conf/passwd and fired up the daemon, restricting it to repo/, thusly:

$ svnserve -d -r /home/svn/repo/

In order for remote access to preserve file permissions on the repository, wrappers for svn, svnserve, svnadmin and svnlook had to be created:

$ cat /usr/local/bin/svn #!/bin/bash umask 002 /usr/local/bin/svn-real “$@”

To prevent the logs on my development machine from filling with failed login attempts, ssh connections to it are on a non-standard port, so the final step in enabling remote svn+ssh:// access was to tweak the ssh settings on the hosting account:

$ cat ~/.ssh/config Host nulltheory.com Port port-number

Finally I was able to perform the initial check-in of my code and then check it out on the production side of things :)

I’ve still got a lot of things to learn about the day-to-day use of version control: for instance, I had problems with some configuration and .htaccess files which are required to be different between development & production. Having to enter my password multiple times to perform an update is also a bit of a drag, but it might motivate me to look into the use of ssh-agent and public-key access to my development machine, doing away with login passwords altogether…

Geek out!