maintaining configuration differences between dev and live environments during deployment from SVN

Question

We use the ExpressionEngine CMS (php) to create websites. For each site, we set up a subversion repository and commit the EE installation as well as any custom templates, images

Answer 1

We deal with this by maintaining a config-specific directory.

So, for instance if you have different .htaccess and config.php files between dev and production they would be maintained in /trunk/config/{environment}/

We use ant/nant scripts to create release packages, and the scripts have a build task for each environment. Those tasks pick up the config specific files.

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Another commenter suggests to switch on HTTP_POST. Unfortunately I can't comment directly (not a high enough rep). Using HTTP_POST to determine environmental configuration has potential security issues since the value of this comes from the client.