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I have a website that I need to deploy to about 30 customers. They are all the same apart from the branding. Using SVN, I would like to have one base version of the product, and then just the different branded content (images, CSS) for each customer. That way, when I maintain the base product, I don’t have to replicate that change for each customer. Deployment would just be a case of updating and releasing.

Sounds simple, but I am having problems achieving this in SVN. I have been looking into SVN externals using a structure as follows:

  • Main
    • Base
      • .
      • .
      • Images

  • Customer 1

    • Base
    • Custom
      • Images

  • Customer 2

    • Base
    • Custom
      • Images

and then using externals pointing the Customer Base folders to the main base folder. That works, but I then need to overwrite (for example) the images in the Customer 1\Base\Images folder with the customer specific ones, and when I set up the externals for that it complains “Customer 1\Base\Images is not a working copy root”. It does appear to have overwritten the image with the customer one though.

Maybe externals are not the answer.

Poinsy
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1 Answers1

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In your case, the interface is clearly separeted from the functionality. A possibility is the following (if I well understood your problem) :

Manage your application in a dedicated SVN repository (as usual, with your trunk, branches and tags). And manage your design versions in another repository, with for example the following structure :

./Customer_1
./Customer_1/trunk
./Customer_1/tags
./Customer_1/branches
./Customer_2
./Customer_2/trunk
./Customer_2/tags
./Customer_2/branches
...

With this separation, it's easy to you to manage the version number of your main application. And you have a "small" repository for each customer with possibility to easily copy a design version to start another one by svn copy.

Caduchon
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