如何维护symfony网站的不同版本

Question

I'm working on a symfony 2 web site, it is a product our company sells (every client gets his own installation).

Each of our client gets a slightly different version of the site: sometimes the differences are small (different strings, slightly different templates), and sometimes they are bigger (different bundles activated, different database schema, different security.yml file etc.)

Currently each version sits on its own git branch. This works for now as we only started selling and don't have many clients(=branches) yet.

But I want to move to a better solution. Any ideas?

Thanks, A

Answer 1

I disagree. If it's a single application, then branches per client or release, ie configurations that need separate histories (change tracking), are precisely the correct practice. Clients use/share the same app, "core", whatever, but possibly you want to control when changes in one client's features/bugs are merged into the other configurations, ie branches. Each client will have to be "upgraded" by merging from the development branch to client's branch, separately, manually. You want to pay this overhead to gain stability and isolation.

As for the specific differences you mentioned:

• Different strings: client specific configs, constants, deployment stuff, should probably be in a per-client/deployment module (include file, whatever), that you can simply ignore when merging, so that the core app code will have no client/deployment specific differences, ever.
• Slightly different templates: meh, this smells bad; if you can use symbolic constants or partials or whatever, and move the differences to a config.php, then see the above solution. Otherwise, don't template diffs suggest it's not the same app anymore?
• Different bundles activated: if you can put the include statements in the config.php, no problem.
• Different database schema: nasty business. Can this app be made schema-independent? Can you do polymorphism somehow? Nu, I don't know, haven't touched PHP in twenty years, I only do CoffeeScript and NoSQL now. ;o)
• Different security.yml: same as with config.php, not a problem, just don't merge that file, or even stop tracking it (remove from repo) altogether.

HTH. ;o)