a canadian startup

Source Code Revisioning for Web Applications

If you’re starting up a web company, you’re going to have to deal with how you should manage versioning for your software.

Here at well.ca, we’ve been discussing the right way to do this for the past two weeks. Web Application source code revisioning isn’t as simple as you’d think.

First off, we tried different Bug Tracking applications. I wanted our Bug Tracking to integrate with our Source Code Revisioning because I’ve experience with how useful this can be when working at RIM.

(By the way, we’re using SVN for Source Code Revisioning which is great. Checking in multiple files as one changeset is the best thing ever–I got addicted to this way of working from using Perforce. They use Perforce at RIM. If you’re still using CVS, switch now!)

So back to Opensource Bug Trackers, we first used Mantis. I chose it because it was recommended by smart people I know and because it is super easy to install. It is a PHP-MySQL app which is usually our first choice here at well.ca

Mantis is nice, but I couldn’t get it to integrate with SVN easily. Chris, our new lead developer, suggested we look at trac. I had seen it before but ignored it–it seemed too much for what we needed and a pain to install.

So I tried Bugzilla. Ugh. I hate the UI, and the install is horrible. Bad experience.

We finally switched to using trac+SVN which has, so far, turned out to be AMAZING. They hook together magically (but it took quite a bit of work to set up on our internal Redhat servers).

So yeah, if you’re starting this process, let me save you some time. Use SVN+trac. Period.

But now that we have the system in place, what are the correct methodologies to make sure we handle versioning and builds properly?

Some of our challenges include:

• Our production server may have different code than our repository–how do we keep track?
• Our personal OSX computers have different setups than our production server
• What if we need to upload a fix directly to the production server but we don’t want other recent changelists to go up there?
• What if I have a recent changelist that I want to go into an old version but there are changelists in between that I don’t want there because they are still in progress?
• How to handle changes in the SQL databases

We’re still thinking about these problems. I’ll post about what we think would work best soon but does anyone out there have a set of best-practices that works for them?