Using Subversion with eZ Publish
Friday 01 February 2008 10:35:00 am
When I suggest to people that they use SVN, I often get these responses:
"We do not know Subversion"
If you do not know Subversion, learn how to use it. It is not difficult. In fact, most of your work is done with three simple commands:
- svn checkout [ http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.ref.svn.c.checkout.html]
- svn update [ http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.ref.svn.c.update.html]
- svn commit [ http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.ref.svn.c.commit.html]
If you are learning SVN basics the best thing you can do is to create an SVN repository to use as a sandbox. If you break something, "live" projects will not be affected.
Usually, the SVN repository is stored on a shared computer that is accessible to everyone who works on your eZ Publish projects. Individual developers use local programs ("clients") to access the source code stored on the SVN server.
The Tortoise SVN client is popular among Windows users [ http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/]. On Mac OS the SvnX client is popular. [ http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/community/subversion/svnx/features/] If you are running Linux then you are probably comfortable with the command-line client. (Command-line clients are also available for Windows and Mac.)
In this article, our instructions assume you are using the command-line interface. For example, to commit changes to the repository, we instruct you to use the command "svn commit". Graphical SVN clients (like Tortoise and SvnX) have an equivalent GUI for these commands.
"A Subversion repository takes up too much space on the hard drive"
This is not an excuse. Hard drives are inexpensive. Buy a big hard drive and start using it for all your projects. Losing your work even once due to the lack of good tools will probably cost more than a hard drive.