What is your favorite web app deployment workflow with SVN?

Question

We are currently using a somewhat complicated deployment setup that involves a remote SVN server, 3 SVN branches for DEV, STAGE, and PROD, promoting code between them through pa

Answer 1

I highly recommend the book (currently in rough cuts) Continuous Delivery, which describes a full process for managing software delivery, based on continuous integration principles (among others).

I strongly dislike the branch and merge approach, as it can get very messy, and is pretty wasteful since you end up spending time on activities which don't actually deliver any new value. You've already developed, tested, and fixed your code once, why create a situation (copying the code to another branch) which requires you to redo this work?

Anyway, the way to avoid branching and merging is to build your deployable artefacts from trunk, and promote the built artefacts (rather than source) as it passes test, staging, etc. This way you are 100% sure that the thing you're putting into production is the same thing you've tested.

If you've got different features which may need to be released on different schedules, changing your approach to how you implement (make functionality configurable, or better yet modular) can help you keep a single development trunk.