PHP Programming
Website Subversion Backup
April 8th, 2008
As a PHP coder and web developer, I have recently discovered and fallen in love with a tool which helps to keep my source code safely backed up. This tool is called Subversion and “it is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation.” (1) In simple terms, it allows you to back up your files and keeps a history of all the versions of files that you send to it.
This is VERY useful when doing PHP development because as you develop your application you can commit versions of the files to the Subversion (SVN) repository and it will keep track of all the changes you have made. If necessary, you can even revert back to older versions.
One of the difficulties that I have run into while doing website development is how to keep the live remote website synchronized with my local working copy. This is especially true of WordPress installations where editors may be uploading new pictures or documents to the site on a daily basis. If you are not constantly downloading the latest copy of the website, your local copy will be out-of-date and may cause problems in your development.
Subversion to the Rescue:
However, I have come up with a relatively simple solution to this problem, which utilizes the controls within Subversion, to both back up the data on the LIVE website, as well as providing version control for all the site data as a whole. For the sake of simplicity, I will be using a WordPress website as my example, but the concepts here could be applied to essentially any website.
One of the useful features of Subversion is the ability to run what they refer to as “hook scripts” at different points in the versioning process. For example, an SVN repository can be configured to run a set of scripts directly after any data is “committed” to it. (sending data to the repository is called “committing” the data) For this example, this is exactly the functionality we are going to be using.
Before I go any further though, let’s go over some of the requirements for setting up a website and subversion repository in this way.
Where to Start with PHP Programming
7 October 2006
I’m going to start this tutorial with an assumption. I’m going to assume that you, the reader, already have access to a PHP enabled server. My specialization is programming, not server setup, so I’ll leave that part out of this. If for some reason, you DON’T yet have access to a PHP enabled server, or […]