SVN checkout or export for production environment?

Question

In a project I am working on, we have an ongoing discussion amongst the dev team - should the production environment be deployed as a checkout from the SVN repository or as

Answer 1

I would look into some deployment software like Capistrano (it's a ruby program)

I would personally use exporting a tagged copy of trunk instead of just exporting trunk if you are going to use be rolling your own solution or manually.

Answer 2

let me see..... ln -s ? what can that be used for?

/var/www/www.my-prod-site.com/public/
/var/www/www.my-prod-site.com/builds/Rev 1/
/var/www/www.my-prod-site.com/builds/Rev 2/
/var/www/www.my-prod-site.com/builds/Rev 3/
/var/www/www.my-prod-site.com/builds/Rev 99/

svn export to your builds directorys...... copy any config files over from /public that is your symbolic link to your former release build, and then just shift the symbolic link from public to point to your new build directory. it takes less time offline than any of the things i have seen posted here, and it also makes going back WAY FASTER unless you fckp your db everytime by altering tables.

Answer 3

I've been struggling with this, and I think I finally decided on checkout. Yes, there is extra junk there, but...

• Export doesn't account for deleted files (unless your solution is to delete everything in the dir and THEN export, which I think is way worse). Checkout will remove deleted files.
• Checkout is faster. Period. Fewer files being updated means less down/transition time, and an export pulls down and overwrites EVERYTHING, not just files needing an update.

Not saying it'll work for everyone, but these two things influenced my decision. Best of luck with your decision.

Answer 4

EXPORT

that's it. You don't have any good reason to put extra junk into production system.

• You'll expose your source code
• If this is web application it's even worse, your visitors can download your source code, how cool is that! very open :)