Workflow for development using IDE and SVN

Question

Before I ask this I realize the answer is going to be different for everyone, but I think that the majority of magento pro's will have some amount of common ground on this.

What is the ideal workflow for magento development using an IDE and SVN?

Up to this point I have been using sublimeText and manually uploading files into the working copy, then once tested, I commit. We are now starting to use PHPstorm with SVN integrated, but the problem I see is how do you test code without committing? If you commit a change and it doesn't work then what? Revert?

Answer 1

As you yourself already said, this is different for every developer/company. I can tell you what the set up is that we're using at my company.

• We are also using PHPstorm as IDE (with Magicento plugin) and we are using GIT instead of SVN.
• We all have a local work station with Ubuntu and running all projects on our local machine.
• We all have forked the project's repositories and make branches for every task we perform. We are committing our changes directly after testing on our local environment.
• Then we will create a pull request (using Atlassian Stash) which will be reviewed by another developer. After that it will be merged into the main repository.

I have used SVN before, but I cannot recall if a workflow like this is possible in SVN.

Answer 2

I hope not to get downvoted because I can't comment, but I wouldn't consider this a concise answer.

Do you not have a development environment separate from production? The way we do it here (albeit using git):

I use Netbeans, but I'm trying out phpStorm.

• Development environment with VCS (master, dev, feature1, feature2)
• Production environment with VCS (master)

The "master" branch on production mirrors the "master" branch on dev.

• Each day, pull from development dev branch to local.
• Create a new branch (if needed). Make changes. Commit these changes to development, then push to development.

From here we can see all the changes in a development environment that perfectly mirrors our production (live) environment.

If these changes are approved:

• Merge development (dev) branch into development (master) branch.
• Push development (master) to production (master).

All of this can be done inside Netbeans (and phpStorm) using git post-receive hooks.