Thanks for your book. It has been most enlightening on managing Drupal projects.

I'm having trouble with SVN and the files directory. Specifically, all the sub dir/files that Drupal creates. Since they are owned by 'nobody', when I run SVN it chokes on them since it doesn't have write permissions, which adds locks and generally buggers up the check out.

Constantly scanning the files dir for new items to chmod doesn't seem practical.

While pouring over your excellent book for clues, I noticed (page 116 figure 5-5) in the Trac log of commits that the 5th commit has the message "moved files directory out of version control"

How do you deal with this? Is keeping the files dir in the repository possible without lots of intervention?

Thanks!

'nobody' is the user used by the Apache HTTP Server; when you upload a file, it is created by that user.

Basically, in order to include the files sub dir, the user who is going to be doing the "svn add" or "svn commit" or "svn update" needs to have group privileges there.

You can do this, or else set up a cron job or else run a script to change permissions recursively each time you are going to use SVN on that subdir.

Victor Kane

__________________
Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

I'm starting to get a handle on file user management. I still have some questions:

Does keeping everything writable pose a security risk? (all my projects are on VPS or dedicated servers)

Keeping up with dirs/files created by Drupal can be accomplished with a recursive chmod and svn add. What about files that Drupal deletes? I.E. a node with an attached file is deleted or imagecache settings are changed flushing the dir. The files should be removed from the repo as well. Imagecache dirs could be set to svn ignore since the files are created on the fly. But not all modules are that obvious.

I guess what I asking is: Does maintaining the files directory under version control over time with an active project require lots of manual tweaking and upkeep?

I think there is no simple answer to what you are asking.

Perhaps it is best, as done in the book Leveraging Drupal, to apply a separate strategy to version control vis a vis backup for production assets, on the one hand, and development concerns, on the other.

Victor Kane

__________________
Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar