Making a php page to do an SVN Update

Posted by vultuk

Having just acquired two new web servers for work today I started to set them up this evening. One thing that I needed to do was make them as user friendly for everyone as possible and one of the main tools I needed for this was SVN. Server 1 is the main web server and Server 2 is purely an SVN Server. All this setup went fine and I went ahead converting all the current sites into SVN to get them ready. However, the need for this to be simple was high so I installed an auto update script to the dev server. This meant that every time a Commit was sent the Dev server automagically did an SVN update meaning it was the latest version.

Now, I could also have done this for the live server but for obvious reasons this wouldn't be acceptable. So, it came down to having to SVN update from command line though SSH. This works however giving command line details, passwords and trust to everyone that would need to update each website could be dangerous, if not through people pressing the wrong buttons but also by people writing down passwords and leaving them lying around. Not good, not good at all.