I am using the downtime over Christmas to set up an affective development environment and workflow that will serve me well as my business increases. I maily do PHP development..
At the moment:
Local Development
I have NetBeans on my Windows PC. I have Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. all installed for local development and testing purposes. I have integrated it all with NetBeans, and I have PHPUnit and Git integrated too. It seems to be working great and I now have my own local repository on my PC.
What I plan:
"Master" Repository
I want to have the same sort of development environment on my laptop, so I can work away from the office. My plan is the have a repository on my VPS for each project (at some point, I'll start deploying dedicated repository servers), that I can upload changes at the end of each work session. In the morning, I'll just download them changes into my local repository and upload any work done at the end of the day. This will serve as a sort of "official" project history, and when I work with other developers, they will work with this too.
Production Repository
I want a repository on my VPS, in the "live" area for my applications. I would like to be able to send out approved and tested changes from the "master" repository to this one when those changes are ready, rather than FTPing files.
Am I going the right way about this? Are there any guides to setting up this sort of thing?
Why do you need a production repository at all? For you to actually utilize it, it would have to not be a bare repository, and you cannot push to the checked-out branch of a repository anyway.
I think the better solution is to have a "production" or "stable" branch in your repository that contains whatever you want to be in production. Then you checkout that branch in your production environment. Whenever you want to deploy something to production, you merge it into that branch, push it to your repository, and then in the clone you have on your server, pull.
Related
I am looking to set up a remote repository on a server that I can push changes on a website to. However, I also want to server to have a working directory, or at least be able have the development version of the website running with the latest changes to the repository.
Do I need to create a local branch on the server to checkout the repository files every time I push changes? Or is there a better way?
I highly recommend you use Capistrano. It is a tool that makes it very easy to deploy a website. It would handle creating a local git repository on your server and checking out the latest version when you run the deploy script. It makes it very easy to deploy to multiple environments (development, staging, production) and it also makes it easy to rollback to previous versions if you discover a bug. All of this is done from your local computer, you would not have to log in to the server after having everything setup.
I had just implemented GIT Version Control for a Team of three people. We are managing to pull/push/fetch etc to our bitBucket repository. My only concern is how I should push live after we make an update to the repository.
On another server, I wrote a shell script to clone the repo into a directory so I would be able to test, but on the live server I cannot do the same since on some occasions I just have to push one file only.
Please note that our live server is inside a network and not accessible over the internet (thus I cannot use BitBucket's push service).
The only advise I can give is to make sure that the local repository (which concentrates changes from the developers) is up to date and in shape before pushing.
Locally you can define your workflow. Perhaps the master repo, into which only official commits are taken, branches for each developer's work once it passes local tests, and each one does as they please on their machines. Or something fancier. There are suggestions on workflows, ranging from almost centralized to completely distributed, check them out. If you adopt one way of working, git won't stand in your way if you decide later to change it.
I'm trying to learn how to use Git in my daily workflow but I'm slightly confused as to how to make it work for me. As a web developer, the way I work is that I have two VPS' - one as a production and the other as a development server. On the development server, I usually create a webdav that points to the source files (located in /home/public_html/dev.domain.co.uk/) and mount it as a local folder on my mac. This way, I can open (or create) the PHP files in my IDE, do what I need to, save the file and then refresh the test link in my browser.
Now, as I say, I would like to start using Git to keep track of all amends I, and my co-workers, make to projects. So my question is how would I do this - would I create a repository on my development server in the public_html folder? And when I clone the repository on the different machines I work on, would I mount the webdav and clone the repository in there? Ideally I want to set up an online repo that myself and co-workers can access.
Any help and/or advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks :)
I have a similar workflow. I was using my IDE to edit the files over SSH, effectively using the files directly on a development server. What I ended up doing was opening a console over SSH to my dev server, and running git there. I use Bitbucket as a remote, and push/pull from there, keeping all of my changes somewhat centralized. What I need to push to my production server, I pull from Bitbucket, and then flip a symlink so that all files appear updated instantaneously.
Git is a decentralized version control system, meaning that you do not need to have a "shared" repository. However, when collaborating, especially if you do not work closely with your coworkers, it might be attractive to have a central point with an "official" repository.
Now in your case, if you want to continue working in your WebDAV exported folder on your testing machine, it depends on if you share this folder with coworkers or not. If it's your private working space, create your git repository there and work with it however you like.
To setup a central, "official" repository you push you changes to, you have several choices depending on your infrastructure:
Use a 3rd party service like GitHub or BitBucket: This is simple to setup and use, but may require subscription fees if you want to keep your repository private.
Use your development server and setup a clone of your repository in a shared place, either via SSH or WebDAV. This might require more maintenance and you don't get the fancy WebUI of GitHub and the likes.
You might also want to have a look at this article about a branching model for development.
You could use a service like http://bitbucket.org.
it's free and it allows to create private and public repositories.
Once you commit changes, simply push it to the server (they tell you how to do it), then have your partner to clone that repository and pull from it whenever necessary.
I've worked on several PHP projects and always I have problems with organizing my work. Where do you develop your application - on localhost, remote server or maybe production one(!) ?
When I work on my localhost after making some major path I send new files by ftp - but sometimes it happens to forget about one file and it is just tiring to browse several directiores to copy changed files.
What best practises do you propose?
This is how we manage our commercial site:
Develop in a local sand box
Check-in to SVN
Automated build/test from SVN onto internal
dev server
Scripted deploy using rsync to staging
server for QA/UAT
Scripted deploy onto production
servers.
Staging and production servers are both hosted by the ISP and are hardware and version matched and run RHEL, internal Dev server is version matched CentOS.
This way, when code hits the production servers there shouldn't be any nasty surprises as even the deploy scripts get checked in stage 4.
Google App Engine has an apposite tool that automatically uploads to the production environment files that are modified; don't know if there's something similar for PHP.
So, doing a dev2prod script (a script that does this automatically) should be a good solution.
To do local source file management, everyone may suggest you to use a source code control system.
I'm developing on a development machine which has an identical enviroment like the production one - that prevents some different behaviour because of different versions or configs. after finishing i just move all the files on to the production server.
Winmerge is a nice and free windows tool to diff your files between development and production machine.
Develop in your local machine with the same exact configuration as your development enviroment (that is apache mods, php extensions and so on), using a version control system (I prefer SVN) to keep track of modified files and what not.
Then you can write a script in your production or testing enviroment to copy/update files off the repository to the web server path.
Probably get told off for redirecting an old post but here's how I do it using free tools:
I use Netbeans, Git, bitbucket, source tree, gitflow and FTPloy.
Bitbucket.com : sign up for free account.
SourceTree: free from bitbucket. Great tool for managing git repositories. All commits, merges and pulls can be done in here. Issues in bitbucket can be tracked.
In sourcetree, take the master branch and click "git flow" - google gitflow - it's fantastic work flow of feature, hotfix, development, and release branches and sourcetree helps automate the process.
FTPloy.com automates the deployment of your master branch. Free is one repo/server. But worth the upgrade if you want to push development branch to a server sandbox for testing.
Hope this helps someone searching the web!
This is my own PHP Development lifecycle.
Create a GIT Private Repository on Github or Bitbucket.
Connect the GIT with cPanel. (It's very easy to commit the changes to the repo as well as a production server).
Develop on Localhost(probably on Xampp on Windows) with Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text
Initialise GIT and connected with the private repository.
Push the changes to the GIT repository (master/branches) - master changes will upload to the production server automatically.
We have a PHP project that we would like to version control. Right now there are three of us working on a development version of the project which resides in an external folder to which all of our Eclipse IDEs are linked, and thus no version control.
What is the right way and the best way to version control this?
We have an SVN set up, but we just need to find a good way to check in and out that allows us to test on the development server. Any ideas?
We were in a similar situation, and here's what we ended up doing:
Set up two branches -- the release and development branch.
For the development branch, include a post-commit hook that deploys the repository to the dev server, so you can test.
Once you're ready, you merge your changes into the release branch. I'd also suggest putting in a post-commit hook for deployment there.
You can also set up individual development servers for each of the team members, on their workstations. I find that it speeds things up a bit, although you do have some more setup time.
We had to use a single development server, because we were using a proprietary CMS and ran into licensing issues. So our post-commit hook was a simple FTP bot.
Here is what we do:
Each dev has a VM that is configured like our integration server
The integration server has space for Trunk, each user, and a few slots for branches
The production server
Hooks are in Subversion to e-mail when commits are made
At the beginning of a project, the user makes a branch and checks it out on their personal VM as well as grabs a clean copy of the database. They do their work, committing as they go.
Once they have finished everything in their own personal space they log into the integration server and check out their branch, run their tests, etc. When all that passes their branch is merged into Trunk.
Trunk is rebuilt, the full suite of tests are run, and if all is good it gets the big ol' stamp of approval, tagged in SVN, and promoted to Production at the end of the night.
If at any point a commit by someone else is made, we get an e-mail and can merge those changes into our individual branches.
Beanstalk has built-in post-commit hooks for deploying to development, staging, and production servers.
One way to use subversion for PHP development is too setup a repository for one or all three developers, and use this repository, more as a syncing tool, than true version control.
You could,
Make a repo
Add your entire PHP document structure of your project
Checkout a copy of this repo into the correct spot on your dev server
Use an svn hook, that activates on commit
This hook, will automatically update the contents of the dev sever, whenever anybody on the team checks in any code.
Hook resides in:
svn_dir/repo_name/hooks/post-commit
And could look like:
/usr/bin/svn up /path_to/webroot --username svn_user --password svn_pass
That will update your working copy on the dev server to the latest check in.
What about something distributed? You can start for example with Mercurial, try different workflows, and see which one fits you the best.
Each of you could run it locally, or on your own dev server (or even the same one with a different port...).
One possible way (there are probably better ways):
Each of you should have your own checked out version of the project.
Have a local copy of the server on your computer and test it there throughout the day. Then at the end of each day (or whenever), you merge together whatever you are ready to test, and you check it out onto the dev server and test it.
Another tool you can use for the builds is TeamCity which is free for 20 build configurations (enough for most small companies/projects.) This way you can run your tests as well as schedule builds.