Automated Update System -- Advice Needed

[wpatterson]

Hello everyone,

I've been programming PHP for about 5 years now, and in the past this forum has been very helpful. This is my first post on phpbuilder and any advice on this issue is more than welcomed... I'm confused on where to start here...

I've created a PHP program which recently surpassed my ability to maintain when it comes to comming out with new updates (we update the system about 2x a month). At the moment I have to manually update 10+ installations of the software and it's getting old... (and the customer base is growing).

Can you provide me with a few ideas? I was thinking about simply having the system look at a certain location on the web for an archive (.zip, or .tar) file once a day and if the timestamp is newer than the one in it's database, simply download it and extract it, overwriting everything that's currently on the system.

I know this seems like a pretty basic idea, but I want to make sure I'm doing it in the most efficient way possible... I was hoping someone had a similar experience and would like to share ideas...

Any ideas for automatically updating files (and also the mysql database) would be VERY much appreciated...

Thank you!
William Patterson

[CoderDan]

auto update routines vary in complexity a great deal.
I'd recommend your best method being a version control system such as subversion so you can work on your code, commit updates to a test serever, then commit to release when ready, and your cluents install their clients and run them either daily, or when you alert them of an update.
This may be massive overkill for your expectations, however.