How to transition a small team developing on a remote testserver from svn to git

Question

At the company I work we use SVN. The SVN repository resides on the local server. When developing we commit the changes to SVN on the local server which transfers the changes via ftp to a testsite remote test server. The whole team uses the same testsite. We use a remote testserver so that we don't have to setup anything on our local machines. If developer A wants to see the changes of developer B on is local machine, he must simply update his working copy.

Most of the time we are very happy with this approach:

• it's simple
• svn is nicely integrated in Netbeans

Things that bother us are:

• the changes are transfered via ftp. When transferring a lot of files this can be quite slow
• we would like to have a repository "in the cloud" so we can develop not only from our office but from anywhere (and without have to setup a vpn)

Is our workflow possible if we were to use github to host our repository? These things are important to us:

• we are not going to develop locally, we would still like to use a testsite on a testserver that is shared by the entire team
• because we do a lot of small changes pushing the changes to the testsite should be very easy
• we have a lot of small sites so the setup that a developer should do per site should be minimal

Answer 1

Have you tried looking Jenkins (used to be Hudson?)

We had some good experiences, where we set up a local Jenkins, and a remote Jenkins Slave on the external Test server that just updated his local copy of the svn, and compiled everything (ant+javac+stuff), deployed everything, restarted the JBoss instance.

All on the external test server.

Answer 2

We just moved from SVN to Git last month. (We love it btw) Jenkins is a great idea, but you can also do something pretty basic. We set up a git clone on our test/nightly environment and have a cron job pull from source control every so often. The cron script is a simple one line pull from git. Because it's a repository clone, it only pulls updates and we can switch branches to test different things.

We are using a paid, secure github account right now rather than setting up our own secure git server. The price is reasonable, and it's working very well for us.