We’ve been trying out springloops as a hosted svn solution for one of our smaller projects, and so far it does the job just fine. We are using it to host the subversion repository for a symfony project. We generally like to use svn:externals for the symfony library files themselves, this way it its easy to upgrade symfony, make sure every deployment has the necessary code base without having to worry about having PEAR installed on every server.
Springloops has a feature that will automatically copy your latest code to a server you specify, either automatically with every commit, or manually whenever you need it. Immediately I ran into a problem: Springloops will not fetch any code in an external repository and copy it to your server. This means that when we tried to auto-deploy our little app, all of the symfony files were missing!
Here is what their support (which was speedy, I might add, even for a free account like ours) says:
Unfortunately deploying externals is not supported at the moment. The reason is it slows down the entire process because our engine would have to download changelog and file contents from remote servers. We are working on a solution to speed it up, but for now you will have to upload it manually just like you said. You might consider using svn export rather than checkout to avoid placing “.svn” control directories on your server.
Good to know. So, given that information, here is a list of possible ways to easily deploy changes to your project:
- Use rsync. With symfony this is easy with the “project-deploy” command line tool. This is my preferred method because it’s just so darn easy, and lets me get away upload changes that aren’t yet committed to svn (gasp).
- Checkout a version of your project from SVN on your server. When it comes time to upgrade, do an “svn up” or “svn switch” to get the latest changes or switch to another tagged release.
- Do an svn export as suggested by the support guy to avoid placing the “.svn” directories on the server. If you don’t prevent access to these directories on your web server, it can pose a serious risk.
Hey guys,
I’ve just signed up with Springloops too, and have just come across the svn:externals limitation. It wouldn’t be too much trouble to upload the main symfony library now and again, but I also use externals for plugins, so keeping track of all the changes would be a pain in the arse. But it’s good to hear that they have a solution in the pipeline.
My question to you, and anyone else, who would like to comment is: the problem with deploying directly from Springloops is that you’d miss out on all the autogenerated model classes. I know that it’s not ‘done’ to include autogenerated files in an svn repo, but would it cause a huge problem if I did? Since I am using the Rackspace Cloud, Springloops is a very attractive solution — they don’t offer rsync.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your/others’ thoughts.
Cheers,
Tom
By Tom on Aug 1, 2009
Tom, it’s common to have a post-deployment script activated that would get triggered by springloops after it gets done copying your files. This script of yours could be used to rebuild your models, run db migrations, etc.
I don’t mind having all of the generated classes in SVN except that each time you rebuild your model with a slight change, *all* of those model files get a new timestamp and end up showing up as modified files in that checkin, which is annoying. But no, it wouldn’t be a huge problem.
By Scott Meves on Aug 1, 2009
Yeah, I see they ask for a url that they would trigger after each deployment. So, could I run all the symfony tasks from there? Or is that a really obvious security threat?
By Tom on Aug 1, 2009
It could be a security issue, however you could populate your URL with a secret key as a GET parameter and then set up your script on your server to only accept requests if the key matches. This key may show up in your web server logs, but hopefully those logs are secure anyway.
I haven’t figured out a way to get access to any hooks (like post-commit) in the springloops repository, but if you are hosting your own svn server that works well, too.
By Scott Meves on Aug 1, 2009