Development techniques

MarkR

It seems to me that a lot of PHP developers don't use a proper development method. A lot of the posters are either:

Developing applications on production servers
OR
Developing on a platform radically different from their production server

Neither of which is a good idea of course.

Does anyone actually use a proper development system, or is it just me?

Mark

bogu

I think is just u ... 😕

jkurrle

I do the bulk of my application development on my production server, but in a restricted area that users are not allowed access to. If I'm tackling something I haven't worked with before, or something more technical, like a OS or application upgrade, my test server takes the brunt of the work first, to make sure I have the procedures down cold before I do any upgrades on the server.

If I am updating an application, I take a copy of the application into a restricted workspace on the server and work on the copy. Once I test the update to make sure it's functional, I back up the original copy and roll in the update. Then I have users pound on it for a while.

I also have a personal development server at home, for when I'm working on new tools and functions to add to my library. That way, if I screw up a main library, nobody is affected but me.

Of course, it goes without saying, that I do backups on a regular basis, just in case... 🙂

justsomeone

I do most of my development and testing on my dev server. I have a pre-production environment partitioned off on my production server for preprod testing. This double-functioning isn't ideal, but this is not for major commercial work.

For my largest commercial project, I have split the costs with the client to provide separate development, test and production servers.

FatalError

I do my testing on a test server on my laptop. Unless I need testing that has to do with domain names (I don't have a domain for the test server), I just use my laptop for the testing. Otherwise, I use my actual production server.

MrPotatoes

i do all of my development on my locahost. because PHP is not OS defined so it can work anywhere. what i do, tho, is i make my code as general and non-specifc and modular as possible. so it's alot easier to actually use one thing or another within the app 😃

ranbla

I have PHP and MySQL on my local machine and do all my development there. When I'm done, I simply mass copy everything to the production server.

rane500

Depends on where I'm at and what I'm doing. At work I have a full development environment set up...development machine, IDE with CVS, and proper roll out/back automation.

At home with personal projects I only use one web server, but I keep development in seperate vhosts. I still use the IDE with CVS as well.

Certain projects for friends have had me using their resources, forcing me to use a production site with seperate directories, vi for the actual coding, and only ftp to back stuff up. 😃

tdnxxx444

I am in the process of setting up a better environment at work. I am planning to continue to have the developers develop on their own workstations by checking out code from subversion. Once done, they use subversion to check in the code to the staging server. From there, tests can be ran. Once everything looks good, we use plan to use rsync to sync the production server with the staging server. Each server has their own configuration file for differences in paths, ips, domains, logins, etc. Also, I am planning to use MySQLDiff to deal with the issue of keeping database schemas the same on the staging on production servers.

steve1401

This may sound complicated, but it works (I use Linux and have the good fortune to be the administrator of our companies web servers which helps)...

I use Zend Studio, Subversion (version control), local server and remote dev/live server.

I have a local copy of my applications on my laptop in a personal area - sat /home/sturnbull/webdev/<application> which is also under version control.

I then FTP my new/modified work to my local server on my laptop. If everything works I commit the changes to Subversion (using Zend Studio) and the FTP then work to a remote production server which is running the identical setup (as far as pos) to my live server.

Assuming all went well, I then FTP the same work to the live server.

The beauty of Subversion and Zend, is that if the changes bring about bugs in a day or two, the Subversion support in Zend lets you easily compare releases, roll back and in no time have everything back to how it was before...

Subversion also allows you to Branch out if making major changes etc, all within Zend to make things graphical and easy to use, you could do the same on the command line as well.

Cheers
Steve