Re: Web Development workflow

On 08/04/12 00:41, Sayth Renshaw wrote:
> Looking for some basic advice tips on how you manage a web
> development workflow in vim. Do you start and manage your server
> from within vim to debug and preview your pages as you edit
> them.
>
> Besides the obvious HTML & CSS I also use JQuery. At TAFE/college
> I have been using visual studio. I want to rebuild this site open
> source.

It may depend largely on your web-dev framework. If it's just raw
HTML/CSS/jQuery, I'd likely just have the files checked out of
revision control (you are planning to use revision control, right?)
and edit them, refreshing the browser in another window as-needed.

I happen to do my web development in the Python framework Django
which offers a development server that notices most changes and
automatically refreshes, making development almost as easy as the
static-file method. I just have one terminal in which I've got my
development server (I can look over there for debugging output as
well), one terminal/window running Vim, and one window for my
browser which I can refresh as-needed. I don't know Rails, but I
think it offers a similar dev-server for testing locally.

For things like PHP or other languages, I'd advise setting up a
local PHP server (whether Apache, nginx, etc) and then every time I
save to the local PHP project's directory, refresh against the local
server.


That said, once I have things working on my local machine, the good
version gets checked into source control. I happen to use git, but
would also recommend Bazaar or Mercurial; so I've been
check-pointing all along into a "development" branch, and then merge
the good version into the "master" release branch. I can then
manually (or automatically, if I've set up some
continuous-integration machine to test/deploy) perform a checkout of
the release branch on the actual server to pull down all the latest
updates without releasing intermediate versions.

So the setup is

- one terminal/window for Vim
- one terminal/window for administrative/VCS stuff
- one window for the browser
- optionally a window for your dev-server if needed

Occasionally, I'll multiplex the 3 terminal windows with "screen"
(others use tmux) into one actual terminal window.

-tim




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