By xpersona on

I have a bunch of sites. Maybe 10 regular sites and 5 Drupal sites. We've started using SVN on our regular sites. Everyone is loving it. Now they are asking me how we incorporate that with Drupal. I've been reading all kinds of stuff online, and I don't see a clear answer. And that may be because there is no clear answer. I was hoping someone might be able to shed some light on this for me.

I know I can use SVN to keep track of all our files - themes, modules, and core updates. What I don't see is a way to checkout databases, commit them, merge changes, and all of that goodness.

Is there a way to handle that gracefully with Drupal?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Don't believe so-- you need to export the db as an .sql file, then you can manage that file with svn (or any vcs for that matter).

But this is not really a drupal specific issue-- you can google around for all sorts of managing dbs with svn resources.

gjangelo’s picture

gjangelo commented

Subversion is for files. A live database is not a file.

As WorldFallz said, export the database as .sql (or .sql.gz) and put that in the repository somewhere.

You may also want to copy the contents of the "sites/default/files" folder from your server and put that into SVN as well, if you are using your repository as a defacto back-up of your site. It's also good for local development, as an SVN Update will get those assets copied to your local folder.

If you are looking for the functionality of having local/staging changes merged with the live database, you need to look into deployment solutions. http://drupal.org/node/980186