How do you manage PHP Project Development Lifecycle?

Question

I've worked on several PHP projects and always I have problems with organizing my work. Where do you develop your application - on localhost, remote server or maybe production one(!) ? When I work on my localhost after making some major path I send new files by ftp - but sometimes it happens to forget about one file and it is just tiring to browse several directiores to copy changed files. What best practises do you propose?

Answer 1

This is how we manage our commercial site:

1. Develop in a local sand box
2. Check-in to SVN
3. Automated build/test from SVN onto internal dev server
4. Scripted deploy using rsync to staging server for QA/UAT
5. Scripted deploy onto production servers.

Staging and production servers are both hosted by the ISP and are hardware and version matched and run RHEL, internal Dev server is version matched CentOS.

This way, when code hits the production servers there shouldn't be any nasty surprises as even the deploy scripts get checked in stage 4.