Thursday, 19 April 2007

Tricks with Symfony and Subversion

There are some tricks that you can do by running a Symfony project with subversion. Dave Dash shows you how under the following sections:

Ignoring files in >cache/ and log/

This is the first thing he tells you to do to ignore files in cache/ and log/. These files are specific to each instance of your application and don’t contain anything that needs to be in version control.

Ignore other auto-generated files

Here he recommends a tutorial on source control by Eric Sink. In his chapter on repositories he recommends checking in only hand edited source code. If a property file generates another file, check in the property file, not the auto-generated result. This not only keeps your repository clean, it prevents a lot of unnecessary check-ins.

Linking the Symfony Library

He says, his preference is to embed the Symfony library into each of the Symfony applications rather than relying on a shared PEAR library. This lets him run multiple versions of Symfony without much fuss. With subversion, he says, you can use the svn: externals property to directly link your application with the symfony subversion repository.

Linking to Symfony Plugins

He says he knows a number of Symfony plugins because of his projects, which tend to share a lot of similar functionality. Many of the plugins are in early stages of development, so he finds it helpful to have them linked from SVN as well. This way he says it helps you to get the benefits of any new functionality.