Rackspace wanted £300 per month for their entry level managed server which had SVN and SSH but this is out of our price range at the moment.

Does anybody know of any other hosts who offer a reliable service but are cheaper than the rackspace price above

For example, we have a script that will autodeploy a new svn/trac server instance, add default users and permissions, etc., as a single command line task.

We make extensive use of our staging environment for testing. But rather than pushing from staging to production, staging gives us a place to test with large fake data sets, but in an environment with the same replication/scaling architectures we have in production. Those kinds of bugs and issues are really difficult to reproduce on a local dev box. It also prevents the “it worked on my machine” issue, as we make sure that staging and production have identical configurations, etc.

So for both staging and production, it’s a single command line task to update the app from a specific svn revision. This approach helps us immensely, and on a personal level, I hate to ever do something twice, so it makes me much less worried about that.

Using tools like svn allows for growing and versioning of your work, so you have to use it - in opinion. So, to take the pain out, I’d write a shell script for the basic setup of your svn. That way all you have to do is run a file, pass some parameters, and sit back a let it do it for you. (assuming you are doing your svn at the prompt)

I don’t think enough attention is given to DRYing up the setup process of development. I get tired of doing some of the same basic tasks to get my development environment/app setup. So, I’ve been writing shell scripts to help out with this process so I write once and then just run the program there on after.

Development servers are simply a subdomain for me that are deployed by a capistrano recipe pulling from svn. When production comes, I deploy to the production server leaving the development server running because we are usually not stopping at versions 1.0, but continue to develop the application.

I don’t use any one-click development tools. As I said, I use a lot of shell scripting these days to take the pain out and DRY up the process.

I’ll be having an article going up on the 18th over at the “Ruby Advent Calendar”:http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/ that talks about a script I wrote for doing all my setup for an edge rails application.

Any questions about this, just shoot me an email, I’d be happy to help out.

I’m not sure, but I think you can use Capistrano even if you’re developing in PHP. You might want to have a look at it.

We’ve got a standard directory structure and system, using Subversion for version control, for quickly building, testing and deploying websites. The only tool we’re really tied to at the moment is Subversion (though we originally started on CVS), since our import tools are heavily dependent on it. (These are tools to do things such as “bring http://foo.net/release/foo-1.3.2.tar.gz into the vendor area of the repository,” and then “bring foo into the external source s for project X”.) Other than that, the system is reasonably agnostic; you pick your web server (we use Apache or lighttpd), your languages (we use Ruby, sometimes our clients make us use PHP), the particular versions of libraries you need, and then make your own dirs for whatever datatabase schemas, libraries and applications you’re building. It’s designed around a full automated install and test framework, which allows you to bring up a server on any machine quite quickly, whether it be a personal development, demo, staging or production server. One particularly nice thing is that, if you have dependencies outside of the source tree, doing a checkout and test on a new host will very quickly tell you what you need to install there for the app to work. (Though mostly we try to keep dependencies in the tree–we almost invariably use an in-tree web server, database driver, and so on.)

Typically, given a new web project, we have the a production server up and running by the end of the first day. It’s inevitably simple–perhaps just a single page serving a few interesting titbits from the database–but it’s there, and from that point onward it’s just a matter of spending a few minutes to release a new feature after someone codes and commits it.

What we’ve just recently got working well is the tool sharing system, so that when we add a feature to a framework tool in one project, we can bring it back into “framework central,” and then in other projects easily pull in those new features. Without some automated help with this kind of chore, we’d never have all of our projects keeping up reasonably well with the framework. It’s invaluable for allowing your framework to evolve fairly rapidly.

I ought to write a paper on this one day.

I’ve been using Bazaar NG instead of Subversion for personal projects recently

Nice tip Simon - cheers.