Developers looking to stay plugged into the bleeding edge of Movable Type without having to depend upon nightly builds may like the following tip which shows how one can always access the following builds reliably and predictably without having to worry about branches, tags or anything else about how the source code is organized:
- The last official release that one can download from our web site
- The last stable release, which includes minimally tested milestone beta builds
- The most recent source code in active development
Pointers to each of these are maintained for your convenience by the development team. Simply execute the following command and you will check out three copies of Movable Type corresponding to each of the above states of the source code (the source code will be placed within a directory called mtos-latest):
svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest mtos-latest
When that is complete you can navigate to the dev directory found within the mtos-latest directory that was just created for you and execute svn up to update to the most recent code in development.
Executing the following command will reveal that this is made possible through a set of three svn:externals:
svn propget svn:externals http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest
In layman's terms, these externals act as pointers to the location within the source tree where you can find the code you are looking for. This is the very mechanism used by our own build scripts to create our nightly builds, something you could do for yourself if you wanted by using the following command:
svn export `svn propget svn:externals http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest \
| grep ^dev | perl -pe 's/^\w+ //'` nightly > /dev/null
Happy holidays and happy hacking.
Arvind Satyanarayan on December 26, 2007, 10:16 p.m. Reply
Sweet, thanks for this tip!
Kevin Cole on July 8, 2012, 8:21 p.m. Reply
The tip is no more actual
Galen on August 5, 2012, 10:46 a.m. Reply
Kevin – What do you mean?
Mark Diame on October 1, 2012, 12:36 p.m. Reply
I have to point here that the update process is made much more easily in Wordpress, where with a simple push you upgrade your version to the newest one.
Cristine Lafont on October 17, 2012, 11:28 p.m. Reply
What does nightly builds mean. The link is broken and I can’t understand what the author has meant.
Amanda Peterson on November 7, 2012, 4:58 a.m. Reply
This is why I use only the official releases. No Beta, no Alfa just the platform which will cause me less problems :) Such as Moveable Type of course which with its custom fields is a great weapon :)
George Wilkinson on December 12, 2012, 3:13 a.m. Reply
Can we try this tips and functions on the official Movable Type demo page? I have no idea have Mihai Buskaru put them on his demo.