LouderThanTen

Louder Than Ten Rockin’ with Subversion

Sep2021:25

Goodbye ftp, hello beautiful sexy Subversion.

A Seed Planted

Ever since reading Bryan Veloso’s article on using Subversion with Media Temple a couple years ago, I’ve been meaning to get svn set up on my own servers. It offers so many advantages over transferring files up to the server via ftp. Between the fantastic version control features, mega fast updates, and the ease of use once setup, it sounded like a dream come true. I’m not sure if it was because of the seemingly overwhelming amount of documentation, the plethora of terminal kung-fu, or sheer procrastination, but after all this time I avoided it.

An Idea Revisited

It wasn’t until I read a fantastic Subversion Series in April this year from Brett Terpstra of Circle Six Design that I decided to revisit the idea again. After spending a few hours reading, scratching my head, testing, reading, and testing some more I finally got things working on my local machine. Great… but still not implemented in any kind of useful way and at the time I had no interest in pushing it out to an actual production site.

This Time For Real

Fast forward about five months or so. I’ve got a shiny new site, a few alternate skins in development, and a bit of free time before I start my new job at Boga. So without delay, I took a day out, got dirty, re-read those fantastic articles, studied the documentation and pounded away in the terminal until I got things running… and I gotta say, it is running fabulously. Anytime I’m ready to make an update, it’s a simple commit command and bam! The site is updated locally and remotely with all changed tracked. No more ftp, no more overwriting the wrong files, no more irreversible mistakes. Plus it serves as a great framework for care-free experimentation.

Life is good. Thank you Subversion, you are my hero.