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Currently we've got two developers on a PHP site and currently all editing is done via FTP (yes OMG I KNOW). I've set-up a Git repository which is going to eventually be used as our source control system.

Basically, how do your developers do the developing exactly? Do they use VM's with a complete production environment or do they all work on an individual test server with individual directories, or something else?

I just want some opinions of how you guys do it to work out what will work best for us.

Thanks

Jack
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We use Mercurial for our PHP development, but in concept it´s very similar to Git.

Every developer has his own computer with a repository and WAMPServer or LAMPServer installed, so that he/she has a full working version of the code locally and can test using http://localhost/.

All local repositories sync with one central repository on the shared network drive. Syncing with the webserver is done from that repository to the webserver using a CGI script that comes with Mercurial. For git there will surely be other ways to start a server and in the worst case, if you only have FTP, there is the gitftp script.

I could imagine that in the future we will also have a second webserver ´testing´, that will be completely identical to the main webserver so that we can test also there. It would be more professional.

littlegreen
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My work and my side projects are pretty much the same approach.

We have a single development server on the local network, and use PuTTY to connect to that. We each work in our own directory, and push to an origin that resides in a different place on the same machine. So basically we don't use our personal machines do develop, except for the actual code editing, which is done in one of two ways:

At work, we use WinSCP to open the files on our machine, as it copies it to a temp folder and saves back automatically. The only annoyance is that it keeps randomly asking for my password once in a while.

For my side business, we have a complex thing going on with samba and ssh tunneling to allow us to directly map our directories on the test server to our windows computers as a network drive. It took a while to figure out how to do it, both in XP and Win 7, but it was totally worth it.

Tesserex
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