I feel your pain and have recently worked through many of the problems that you are currently struggling with. This is the solution that we found works for us and is in no way "best practice" or the "right way", but hey, it works for us with 20 developers all working on the same set of code!
We decided to have each developer run a local copy of CF under apache as well as installing TortoiseSVN to interact with SVN (Subversion). Our IT guys helped me put together an installer package that had the apache conf files as well as all the necessary installers. We wrote a few CF files that used the admin API to create all the necessary datasources etc. This enables us to bring a computer from start to configured in about an hour. We have two "environments", QA and production that we deploy to. When we are ready to QA a release, we create a branch from the trunk and have our QA server switch to that branch for testing. If there are any problems, we update the trunk and merge those changes into the release branch. Once this branch is ready for deployment onto our live servers we simply have the live servers switch to the new release branch. Currently we are not using many automated processes to accomplish this (outside of SVN) but I'm looking into ANT and CruiseControl as I've heard really great things about both for automated deployments. In regards to your question about the logistical nightmare of keeping all developers in sync...well SVN handles all of it from a code perspective. When a developer attempts to commit changes to the repository, they are notified that their local copy is out of date and they must sync with the server prior to any commits. On the data side, we have data environments (development, qa, live) and all developers have their CF datasources pointed to our dev DB server. HTH Rich -----Original Message----- From: Konopka, David [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 2:19 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Development Environment Setup You could create individual user shares on a development web server. Each developer would check out code to his/her user share to code with. ___________________________________ David Konopka Wharton Computing and Information Technology -----Original Message----- From: Neil Middleton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 9:20 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: Development Environment Setup Hi guys, Question on how best to setup our development environment. I know it's been asked before, I would like your ideas on our specific setup: Currently we maintain several applications under many websites, on a single development server (CFMX7 and SQL2000). Developers work direct on the shared development server via VSS (do some work, save it, check it in to see if it works...very time consuming). Releases are then done by the tech support guys, who get sent a list of things to push to test (which is currently a manual task). Developers have no access to SQL Admin or CF Admin. As you can guess, this isn't the best, and I personally would like to see us using a better source control system (Subversion?). I would also the like the source control and release process to be a lot more transparent in the overall process. I have seen mentions of people having devs running their own instances of CF/SQL, but how the hell do you keep these up to date without creating a logistical nightmare (i.e making sure every developer is in sync with both code and external requirements such as IIS setup?) Cheers in advance.. -- Neil Middleton Visit feed-squirrel.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:249343 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
