Auto-Updating Systems via Subversion

One technique that I’ve started to use a lot around the different systems here is to store everything in subversion. It’s a pretty commonly recommended technique and the nicest benefit is that if your changes don’t do what you wanted you can easily roll back to an earlier version.

I’ve found though, that my favorite benefit is that it makes it easy to set up automatic updates for systems. Generally I just add an ‘svn update’ as the first step in running the appropriate system. When that’s not suitable, a simple cron job does the job just as well. For our cruise control server we actually have a “config” project which builds every 30 minutes and all it does is update cruise control’s config files.

When you’re dealing with windows servers remote log-ins can be difficult and even UNIX servers are annoying to SSH into across the pacific so being able to edit files locally and have them deploy automatically is a real time saver.