I’ve found several pages on the internets that discuss how to do a good subversion setup, and they each had their strong points. I’ve combined their approaches into a method for making a canonical blank app.

Creating the canonical app

First, you should create a repository for your canonical blank app. Let’s say it’s at http://svn.my_svn.com/canonical/trunk. I trust that you know how to do this. Then, you can create your app:

rails canonical
cd canonical

Next you can do an in-place import of your SVN repo into your app directory:

svn checkout http://svn.my_svn.com/canonical/trunk .

Don’t forget the final period in that command; it’s critical. SVN should say something like Checked out revision 1. This step puts our newly created canonical directory under Subversion control.

Adding all of your files to the repository

Now we put all of our files under Subversion control:

svn add --force .

Again, don’t forget the trailing period. This command will output a long list of files with a leading “A”, indicating that they’ve been added.

Create the rake task

Put the following code in a file called svn.rake in the lib/tasks folder:

desc "Configure Subversion for Rails"
task :setup_svn do
  puts "Removing /log"
  system "svn remove log/*"
  system "svn commit -m 'removing all log files from subversion'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/'
  system "svn update log/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /log/ ending in .log'"

  puts "Ignoring /db"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.db" db/'
  system "svn update db/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /db/ ending in .db'"

  puts "Renaming database.yml database.example"
  system "svn move config/database.yml config/database.example"
  system "svn commit -m 'Moving database.yml to database.example to provide a template for anyone who checks out the code'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config/'
  system "svn update config/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring database.yml'"

  puts "Ignoring /tmp"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/'
  system "svn update tmp/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /tmp/'"

  puts "Ignoring /doc"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*" doc/'
  system "svn update doc/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /doc/'"
end

Do any other setup

If there are any other setup or configuration bits that you use all the time — plugins, ActionMailer configs, date formats, etc., put those in the appropriate places. When using script/plugin make sure that you use the -x flag to get the Subversion stuff right. When using script/generate be sure to use the --svn flag to add the files automatically to Subversion.

For example, at my work most of our apps routinely connect to multiple databases, so I put stubs for each of them in database.example. I also like to have certain date formats available to me,

Run the rake task

Now, execute the new rake task:

rake setup_svn

Be warned, though, you should only run this once on the canonical: it moves the database.yml file to database.example, making the project non-functional. You don’t want any passwords in there, either, since you don’t want to expose them in the repository.

The script does a bunch of commits, so any changes you have made to your canonical will be saved to the repository.

Export new projects

The next time you want to create a new Rails project, instead of doing rails projectname you should do the following:

1. Export the canonical from the repository
2. Do an in-place import from the new project’s repository
3. Rename database.example as database.yml and populate it
4. Run rake secret and copy the new secret code into your environment.rb (you don’t want all of your apps to have the same code)

If you don’t want to mess with the canonical, you can just drop the svn.rake file in to your new projects and run it. That would give you some DRYness, like a good hitchhiker’s towel.

That’s it!

Now you should have a good canonical app that makes creating new projects a breeze. At my work we have multiple developers and we will have dozens of apps by the time we’re done migrating ourselves out of the old platform. By standardizing our new projects this way, it makes our startup time much faster and leads to better habits (like always using Subversion), and there is no bad in any of that.

Even though I’ve started a new job, which I love by the way, my freelance work continues. Last week I launched the newly redesigned Oregon Ki Society site, and it’s now in my portfolio. This one is particularly near and dear to my heart, as I began training Aikido with the OKS 11 years ago, and still train today.

To be honest, when I first saw their site in 1996 I wanted to get my hands on it to fix it up. Little did I know they would still be using the same site in 2007, when I was finally in a position to do something about it. The new site is crisp, clean and fresh with lots of strong photography. I’m also quite proud of that since I shot most of the photos.

The content is interesting, too; there are Ki Society dojos all over the world, and so there might be one near you. If there is, it’s worth checking out. The aikido training the Ki Society offers is unparalleled.

Although this page went live a little while ago, I’ve just gotten around to writing it up. A scientist at the University of Santa Barbara contacted me about making a professional page for her. I’ve added it to my portfolio. I’m particularly happy about the image at the bottom of the page behaves: use a big screen and make your browser window wide. Very wide.

I hope that the page will help Claudia advertise her work both to other scientists as well as to potential students and field assistants.

The apartment I got is pretty sweet, too. It’s a 1940s vintage unit with great hardwood floors and a small but highly usable kitchen. Its only downside is that the stove is electric and not gas. Sigh. I’ll just have to make it work, but I’ll miss the easy chile roasting capacity of the gas stoves.

I was super excited when I was up there because I locked in the apartment and the job within 48 hours of landing. I was kind of surprised at the job offer that came the day after the interview, but I was really surprised about finding the apartment. I’m told by my PDX friends that I’m backwards; I should be shocked at the job offer given the tech job market in Portland these days, but that finding an apartment is really easy. I guess that living in Santa Barbara for so long really skewed my understanding of what a normal housing market is like. I’d sort of forgotten that landlords aren’t always despots and that there are places in this country where apartments stay on the market for more than 48 hours before being rented.

Cheers to Portland!

1. Pursuing a career in a field with employment opportunity
2. Being in an industry that has portable skills, so that my Australian wife and I can move to Perth
3. Getting a job (see #1)
4. Finally starting to earn some money - 28 is a bit old to still be a student

Looking down the track at a career in Botany, I see that there just aren’t any jobs out there. It doesn’t make sense to play the academic game for another decade finishing a Ph.D. (which lowers lifetime earning potential) and pursuing a couple of post-doc positions to then find out that there isn’t a job for me to do. So it is with regret that I’m leaving academia, as I still love many things about it. Instead of being a botanist who dabbles in web technologies, I’ve decided to become a web designer who botanizes; I’m switching my vocation for my hobby.

So what does this mean for you dear reader, dear web? It means that you have another blog to read. I intend to fill these pages with discussion about the web and web technologies, breaking in to the IT industry, design, plants, and good food (my other hobby). These pages will be part personal, part professional. I hope that they will be all enjoyable.