Ruby on Rails provides an elegant and speedy framework for developing web applications.
But having a framework isn’t the only requirement for building a successful software product. More infrastructure is required. Like sensible revision control for distributed development. If you suspected that it isn’t necessary to archive all that boilerplate associated with a Rails project… you’re right. You don’t need to archive it. Which means building your subversion repository is a little more involved than svn add myrubydir/*. If you do that, you’re going to be committed megabytes of irrelevant log files.
[Note: I moved to Git and Github before finishing this article, but these links may yet be of interest to developers using Subversion.]
Links for in-depth information
If you’re already well-versed in subversion, none of this should have been a real stretch, just picking over the details of Rails. These were two of my primary sources of information for Ruby on Rails specific material:
- François Beausoleil over at TekSol.info gives us a “Subversion Primer for Rails projects”
- Mark Kirby gives us another “Subversion and Ruby on Rails” article, with some very handy scripts to help automate the process.
