Proper way to roll out website updates

Question

I have an enrollment website which is updated on a fairly regular basis with minor changes. While these 'fixes' don't necessarily present any issue, we are in a phase where we need to roll out some major changes.

I am looking for the right way to make these changes, noting that if something goes "wrong" on the live-site, I need to revert back to a former 'safe' state as quickly as possible.

I have done some searching on the net about 'subversion' as a method to do just this but I have a few questions/issues:

1) Am I going about this the right way?

2) Is subversion the proper method to use?

3) If subversion is the way, can anybody provide a "beginner's guide" to subversion as most of the material I find assumes you have a vast understanding of, not only itself, but of how to implement within Linux environments as well.

of note: I run all my code on a local windows machine before passing over to a Media temple Hosted Dedicated Virtual server running Cent OS 5.

Answer 1

You don't have to necessarily use subversion, or any version control system, in order to revert back to your safe update. Tools like subversion are easy to install, and work great to version control your software. But, if you're just looking to simply be able to revert a website deployment, sometimes the easiest path is to simply back up all of your files on your server first, then apply your update. If the update fails, simply restore your backup. You can back up to temporary directories, zip files, etc.

Subversion is great for version control, but even on very small / individual teams it's useful to track your source code changes, since you can apply comments every time you "commit" your changes into the version control system. These comments can help to act as a change log for your future reference. In addition, using a version control system allows you to compare the change history of a single file. I.e. visually seeing what parts of a single file were changed from one version to the next. That can serve as a great future reference.

You could set up Subversion if you wanted to in order to track your source code changes, but the most pragmatic way to deploy your changes and be able to revert in the event of a disaster would be to simply back up all of your website files first.

This SVN reference is pretty easy to digest: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/