16th November 2010 - 6 minutes read time
Automatic building with Phing makes deploying to a server nice and easy, and if you are using SVN as your source control system then you can easily deploy directly from your repository to your web server.
To allow Phing to utilise an SVN server you must first install the VersionControl_SVN pear library. Although this is in alpha release I have used it quite a bit with no issues. The only thing is that you will need to specify the version number to pear if you want to install it, like this:
pear install VersionControl_SVN-0.3.4
To get Phing to export from an SVN repository you can use the svnexport task. The following build file sets up some parameters (for use in this task), runs a target to delete the existing export and then runs a target that exports from the SVN repository we have set up.