NYCPHP Meetup

[csnyder]

On 9/3/05, Eric K. <kigathi at gmail.com> wrote:
  
>  2) Is there a shortcut to speed up development or must I duplicate the
> entire server/dev environment in every developer's workspace?

In his Eclipse demo Hans really bashed VNC for development, but I've
had great results using it to allow a small team to do work directly
on a development server from their own workstations. It's definitely
recommended over sftp or WebDAV for development on the same LAN, just
as those technologies are more useful when working remotely.

But there's another angle to this: a well-planned project should be
easy to deploy. If each developer has to install XAMPP, edit their
local Apache config, create and initialize the database, and create a
local configuration file before they can start hacking the code, you
will collectively figure out how to streamline the process early on.

Document the install process and put it in a docs folder in your
project, along with an sql dump of the database structure and whatever
test data you work with. (Or use a remote connection to a single
database.)

One thing I would add to J and A's presentation: don't put your local
configuration file (the one that sets paths to things) under version
control.

If you have something like conf/config.php, move it to
conf/config-dist.php before importing your code into subversion. After
you check out the first working copy, and recreate the local
configuration at conf/config.php, you should (for safety's sake) tell
subversion to ignore that file from now on:

svn propedit svn:ignore conf    

...tells svn you want to edit the ignore property of the conf
directory. Svn opens an editor, to which you can add the single line:

config.php

Once you commit the property change, svn will ignore conf/config.php
so that someone can't accidentally add it and overwrite everyone
else's local configs. For more on svn:ignore, see
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s02.html#svn-ch-7-sect-2.3.3


-- 
Chris Snyder
http://chxo.com/