How do you manage PHP Project Development Lifecycle?
This is how we manage our commercial site:
- Develop in a local sand box
- Check-in to SVN
- Automated build/test from SVN onto internal dev server
- Scripted deploy using rsync to staging server for QA/UAT
- Scripted deploy onto production servers.
Staging and production servers are both hosted by the ISP and are hardware and version matched and run RHEL, internal Dev server is version matched CentOS.
This way, when code hits the production servers there shouldn't be any nasty surprises as even the deploy scripts get checked in stage 4.
Google App Engine has an apposite tool that automatically uploads to the production environment files that are modified; don't know if there's something similar for PHP. So, doing a dev2prod script (a script that does this automatically) should be a good solution.
To do local source file management, everyone may suggest you to use a source code control system.