Professional Ruby on Rails™

Chapter 2. Rails Source Control With Subversion

Every software project needs to manage its source code. Developers on the project need to be able to find code within the project. Multiple people need to be able to work together on the project and see each other's work without accidentally overwriting it. And you need to make sure that nothing is ever, ever lost.

Rails provides a standard project layout, which helps with the first issue. For the second and third issues, you need to turn to a source control system. That system will allow each developer to retrieve code from a common repository and then return their changes to the repository. As soon as a developer has placed their changes back in the repository, other developers on the project can update their local copies of the code to see the changes. If two developers are working on the same file at the same time, the source control system manages the combination of the two pieces of work so that neither is lost. Using a source control system, you can recreate any past state of your application at any time.

Core Rails development (and most Rails plugin development) is performed using a version control system called Subversion, which has become the standard tool for many open-source projects. Because so much existing Rails development uses Subversion, you can get some benefits from using it in your own development. In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up your Rails project using Subversion, and how to use it to stay on the ...