Web-Based Version Management

Posted on February 15th, 2008 by Greg Allard in CyTE, Programming |

This is an idea to help with CyTE, but I’d like to start seeing this idea applied to other web-based software as well. Having an interface to update the software easily and keep a revision history would help web-based apps become closer to desktop apps. Programs like Adobe Flash Player will check for updates periodically, download them, and install them. It would be nice for web-based apps such as phpBB3 or CyTE to have similar possibilities.

The plan is to have a page in an admin section that will check the project’s svn repository (a tag like latest-stable will help). If there is something newer than the current version, it will check if any of the files have been modified locally (since it’s open source). If there are modifications it will predict whether there will be conflicts or not. There will be a button to update the code. Before it updates, a backup will be made. Rollback options will be provided for local backups and each revision in the repository will be able to be installed. This should provide maximum flexibility combined with ease of use. The biggest obstacle of this at the moment is there isn’t a package written in php that handles svn without needing required modules in php. Being able to use this on any server with php5 is the biggest requirement.

I use webfaction to host a lot of my django projects. It has an easy setup that will get you developing quickly and a great community of talented programmers. There is also a quick setup for rails, wordpress, and a lot more.

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Greg Allard

I've noticed that WordPress Plugins have the ability to do some of what I would like. I'm not sure if they have revision histories or rollbacks since there wasn't a problem when I was updating.

I will have to look into how they are doing this.

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About the Author

For the last six years, Greg Allard has been a web developer for UCF. Over the years, Greg has developed many applications with PHP/MySQL, but just recently, he fell in love with Python and Django. On nights and weekends he works on his startup, IvyLees, a social media newsroom builder.

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