I’m managing a website in my repository. How can I make the live site automatically update after every commit?
(This article is from http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#website-auto-update)
This is done all the time, and is easily accomplished by adding a post-commit hook script to your repository. Read about hook scripts in Chapter 5 of the book. The basic idea is to make the “live site” just an ordinary working copy, and then have your post-commit hook script run ‘svn update’ on it.
In practice, there are a couple of things to watch out for. The server program performing the commit (svnserve or apache) is the same program that will be running the post-commit hook script. That means that this program must have proper permissions to update the working copy. In other words, the working copy must be owned by the same user that svnserve or apache runs as — or at least the working copy must have appropriate permissions set.
If the server needs to update a working copy that it doesn’t own (for example, user joe’s ~/public_html/ area), one technique is create a +s binary program to run the update, since Unix won’t allow scripts to run +s. Compile a tiny C program:
#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void){
execl("/usr/local/bin/svn", "svn", "update", "/home/joe/public_html/", (const char *) NULL);
return(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
… and then chmod +s the binary, and make sure it’s owned by user ‘joe’. Then in the post-commit hook, add a line to run the binary.
If you have problems getting the hook to work, see “Why aren’t my repository hooks working?”.
Also, you’ll probably want to prevent apache from exporting the .svn/ directories in the live working copy. Add this to your httpd.conf:
# Disallow browsing of Subversion working copy administrative dirs. <DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/"> Order deny,allow Deny from all </DirectoryMatch>