PHP Subversion Setup FTP

Question

I work at a small php shop and I recently proposed that we move away from using our nas as a shared code base and start using subversion for source control.

I've figured out how to make sure our dev server gets updated with every commit to our development branch... and I know how to merge into trunk and have that update our staging server, because we have direct access to both of these, but my biggest question is how to write a script that will update the production server, which we many times only have ftp access to. I don't want to upload the entire site every time... is there any way to write a script that is smart enough to upload only what has changed to the web server when we execute it (don't want it to automatically be uploading to the production enviroment, we want to execute it manually)?

Does my question even make sense?

Answer 1

Basically, your issue is that you can't use subversion on the production server. What you need to do is keep, on a separate (ideally identically configured) server a copy of your production checkout, and copy that through whatever method to the production server. You could think of this as your staging server, actually, since it will also be useful for doing final tests on releases before rolling them out.

As far as the copy goes, if your provider supports rsync, you're set. If you have only FTP you'll have to find some method of doing the equivalant of rsync via FTP. This is not the first time anybody's had that need; a web search will help you out there. But if you can't find anything, drop me a note and I'll look around myself a little further.

EDIT: Hope the author doesn't mind me adding this, but I think it belongs here. To do something approximately similar to rsync with ftp, look at weex http://weex.sourceforge.net/. Its a wrapper around command line ftp that uses a local mirror to keep track of whats on the remote server so that it can send only changed files. Works great for me.