Ask Slashdot: Taming a Wild, One-Man Codebase?

New submitter tavi.g writes "Working for an ISP, along with my main job (networking) I get to create some useful code (Bash and Python) that's running on various internal machines. Among them: glue scripts, Cisco interaction / automatization tools, backup tools, alerting tools, IP-to-Serial OOB stuff, even a couple of web applications (LAMPython and CherryPy). Code has piled up — maybe over 20,000 lines — and I need a way to reliably work on it and deploy it. So far I used headers at the beginning of the scripts, but now I'm migrating the code over to Bazaar with TracBzr, because it seems best for my situation. My question for the Slashdot community is: in the case of single developer (for now), multiple machines, and a small-ish user base, what would be your suggestions for code versioning and deployment, considering that there are no real test environments and most code just goes into production ? This is relevant because lacking a test environment, I got used to immediate feedback from the scripts, since they were in production, and now a versioning system would mean going through proper deployment/rollback in order to get real feedback."

Comments

A few things

[jlechem]

1. Buy or get a machine to host SVN for version control. I work on my wife's company website and some basic management tools. SVN has saved my bacon on multiple times where I thought I had lost some code.

2. Get a pre-production server and test your code! Sounds like you're living in the wild west and that shit flies until something goes horribly wrong and you're the guy who gets blamed.