Tips for symfony and Subversion

[tags]symfony, subversion[/tags]

There’s some tricks you can do to running a symfony project with subversion:

Ignoring files in cache/ and log/

The first thing you can do (and this is well documented in the askeet tutorial) is ignore files in cache/ and log/. These files are specific to each instance of your app and don’t contain anything that needs to be in version control.

Run the following:

cd $SF_ROOT
rm -rf log/* cache/*
svn propedit svn:ignore log
svn propedit svn:ignore cache

svn propedit will bring up a text editor, in both instances you want to save the following:

*

Ignore other auto-generated files

Eric Sink wrote an excellent tutorial on source control. In his chapter on repositories he recommends checking in only hand edited source code. If a property file generates another file, check in the property file, not the auto-generated result. This not only keeps your repository clean, it prevents a lot of unnecessary check-ins.

If you use propel for your ORM layer there are a few files you can ignore using svn propedit svn:ignore {dirname}.

In $SF_ROOT/config we can ignore:

*schema-transformed.xml

These are xml files that propel generates from schema.xml (or schema.yml).

In $SF_ROOT/data/sql we can ignore:

lib.model.schema.sql
plugins.*.sql
sqldb.map

These are created from schema.xml (or schema.yml) as well.

The real savings will come with your model. The propel model creates customizable php classes in lib/model which inherit from auto-generated files in lib/om there are also auto-generated map files in `lib/map’

We can run from $SF_ROOT:

svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/om
svn propedit svn:ignore lib/model/map

and enter

*

for both properties.

If you’ve mistakenly checked in some of these files you will need to remove them from your repository via svn delete.

Linking the symfony Library

I prefer to embed the symfony library into each of my symfony apps rather than relying on a shared PEAR library. This lets me run multiple versions of symfony without much fuss. With subversion we can use the svn:externals property to directly link our app with the symfony subversion repository.

At first this sounds like danger, but externals can be linked to specific revisions. However, the symfony team tags their repository with version numbers. To get this to work we need to do 3 things. (UPDATE: See Fabien’s comment about using the lib/vendor directory)

1. Modify config/config.php to look for symfony internally. Just open it up and change it so it says this:
   <?php $sf_symfony_lib_dir = dirname(__FILE__).'/../lib/symfony'; $sf_symfony_data_dir = dirname(__FILE__).'/../data/symfony';

2. Run svn propedit svn:externals lib from $SF_ROOT and enter:

    symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/lib/ or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post, `RELEASE_1_0_2` is fairly fresh.
   

3. Run svn propedit svn:externals data from $SF_ROOT and enter:

    symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_2/data/ or whatever version of symfony you want to link to, at the time of this post.
   

Now when you do svn update you’ll have the symfony library all linked up. Furthermore this keeps all the developers on the same version of symfony.

Also you may want to start running symfony using ./symfony versus symfony. The former looks at your configuration settings to determine which symfony command to use, the latter is generally linked to your system wide command (which is generally the PEAR installed command).

Linking to symfony Plugins

I have my hands in a number of symfony plugins because I work on a lot of projects which tend to share a lot of similar functionality. Many of the plugins are in early stages of development, so I find it helpful to have them linked from svn as well. This way I can get the benefits of any new functionality and if the occasion should arise, I can contribute any useful changes I make.

To link to the plugins you run svn propedit svn:externals plugins and enter one plugin per line in the following format:

{plugin_name} -r{REVISION} {URL}

For one of my projects I use:

sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfPrototypeTooltipPlugin
sfGuardPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfGuardPlugin
sfZendPlugin http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

I’ve omitted the revision, because I live dangerously and want to use the latest $HEAD.