Making a production build of a PHP project with Subversion

If you use TortoiseSVN, you can use the export feature to automatically strip out all of the .svn files. I think other svn things have the same feature.

Right click the root project folder, then select TortoiseSVN > Export, and tell it where you want the .svn free directory.

Copy all the files manually or using your existing method for the first time. Then, since I take it you're on a Windows platform, install SyncToy and configure it in the subscribe method, which would effectively one-way copy only the changes made since the last pseudo-commit to production for files already in production. If you want to add a file you can just copy it manually and resume the SyncToy operation.