Internal Version Control + Staging Server for multiple web sites?

[DylanButler]

A friend's marketing company needs to setup some version control for their client's web sites. They also need something in the form of a client (staging) server (for the client to preview work), and a development server?

I have read the subversion manual and I have used it in the past. Would they need to have their own server in-house for such a setup?

Basically they need version control and two "servers" (one internal, one external + internal) - Development and Staging before pushing things live.

Could this type of environment be setup on a remote host? Also if you can recommend tips to remain consistent across the servers for the most part that would be cool too (like an active directory system, ie.
clientsite.com.internal
clientsite.com.stage.mycompany.com
clientsite.com



Your input is greatly appreciated.

 

[TwistMyArm]

I can't really comment on the staging server side of things, but I just wanted to address the question of: "Would they need to have their own server in-house for such a setup?"

The short answer is no, they don't have to. There are a number of companies out there that will host your SVN repositories for you remotely. svnrepository.com and cvsdude.com are two that come to mind. For what it's worth, I haven't used ANY of them. Also Dreamhost, although a normal web host, does provide a SVN server on your account (I assume that's what it is, anyway).

Having said all that, you could always just set it all up in a virtual machine in-house (assuming the problem was the need for hardware). A quick Google turned up http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/519 which is free to download (a VMWare image which you can run in the free VMWare).

 

[DylanButler]

Having said all that, you could always just set it all up in a virtual machine in-house (assuming the problem was the need for hardware). A quick Google turned up http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/519 which is free to download (a VMWare image which you can run in the free VMWare).

Awesome, thanks for the info. An instructor has advised me to get a Dell to run in-house as an internal server. He said I should setup IIS, and then I could use any of those repositories to manage code. I am not seeing how all this stuff fits together; is subversion the best solution for managing multiple site trunks in a centralized location for an internal network?

When it comes time to move/edit files or add a new trunk, how fast/difficult is the setup?

Will people on the network be able to edit files quickly and easily?

 

[TwistMyArm]

Firstly, don't set up IIS unless you're really aiming at .NET stuff. When it comes to PHP, Perl and most of the other languages, Apache is a lot easier to set up (plus you can get the all-in-ones like XAMPP which makes it even easier).

As far as I know, the web server you use has nothing to do with either CVS or Subversion... they both run their OWN servers (as opposed to running through either Apache or IIS). CVS I'm 99% sure about this and SVN I'm 90% sure. There are some web interfaces to the repositories that run through your web server but they don't allow you to use normal clients. That is to say, you will still need to be running a separate server (or service, if you want to call it that)... they can run alongside (ie. on the same machine as) Apache or IIS, and they run on a different port number. Essentially whereas Apache or IIS servers serve up HTML, revision control servers serve up revision controlled files

Now whether or not it's the most suitable, I couldn't say... it's almost a religion to some (not that that's a bad thing). Most people will tell you that SVN is better than CVS. If your developers are doing a lot of 'alone' development (either just working on big/different features or are physically unable to connect to the repositories for any length of time) then I would also suggest looking at the 'distributed' or 'non-linear' solutions such as Git (which was originally written by Linus Torvalds for managing the Linux source code).

A couple of links that might help with the decision:
Comparison of revision control software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software
List of revision control software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revision_control_software

Now regarding setup: I did a CVS repository years ago but haven't done any of that kind of stuff since then. I can only assume that it gets easier every year and it wasn't that difficult when I did it.

Unless you're moving files around and so on, they'll feel pretty similar with regards to user response time. Having said that, I find that especially new users will prefer the GUI clients to the CLI ones, so make sure you can get a good GUI client for whatever system you end up on (I really like the Tortoise ones for CVS and SVN).

Sorry I can't really answer your questions... I only know what I've experienced and I know that isn't much in this area.

 

[DylanButler]

Thanks for the info, it helps a lot.

So I am thinking the easiest thing for myself would be to install Apache on a windows machine, and then let other computers in the network connect to it through a LAN.

Or would it be even smarter to just install XAMPP on a dedicated machine so we can quickly run PHP, mysql, and HTTP from a centralized location? I think for a development perspective this would probably be sufficient. Forget about version control for now.

Do you know of any tutorials for setting up a server on a windows network? Will we be able to run php/mysql after installing apache?

Thanks for all your help.

 

[TwistMyArm]

If I were you and that's the route I was going, I'd go straight for XAMPP. It should work 'out of the box' for you for all people in the LAN and Apache / PHP / MySQL will be all set up for you.

Just be sure to read any readmes.

Of course there would not be anything stopping you from installing Subversion on the same machine (it can be installed on Windows).