We have some really big news to anounce shortly, but we are waiting for a few other key things to come in to play before we make the announcement. Until then, I thought I would provide a post about some improvements I have been making to the development process here at Peacock Carter.

For quite a while we have used Subversion for version control, which has worked well. It was only really used for storing copies and was not set up very well. Recently, I’ve set up a new Linux computer purely for development purposes, and on that I’ve installed Ubuntu, the LAMP stack, Subversion with Web Dav support and a few other bits and pieces. Along with this I’ve spent quite some time setting up some systems and processes to help make this new solution better than the previous one.

Developing On My Local Machine

Previously, development and testing was done locally on my computer - the code would be stored in a 'wampserver' directory so I could run and test code locally, and (as I mentioned before) Subversion was only used for storing the code, as a back-up. Now, I have a process on the Linux box which takes the repository, checks it out and sets it up in a special “staging” area on the machine so that testing is done there, making it easier for code collaboration - encouraging more frequent commits, and opening the process up more to Richard.

Another process I’ve added is adding our development database into version control, so that we can easily revert changes made. To do this I’ve got another process running on the Linux box which checks out a seperate repository for the database, grabs a dump of the database structure and another dump of the actual data, and then commits these to the repository.

Although I’ve only completed the last of these changes today, they have really helped the process overall, and things are much easier for us now! Back to more development, then...