SVN Checkout to Cataloged Appliance Volume?

[kapow]

We are building a hosted application that will have a provisioned instance per customer. To facilitate updating those many instances, we plan to catalog our custom appliances that might require updating.

What I'd like to be able to do, is perform an SVN checkout directly on to the appliance's volume from our SVN repository. Then, when each provisioned instance is restarted, it would pick up the new code. Is this possible?

[PeterNic]

Currently, the only way to get a new catalog appliance on the grid is using the "class import" command. You may be able to check out the class from SVN to the grid's impex volume (scp/sftp) and then execute "class import". The "class import" can be scripted -- there is no need for a human to do this. You can organize the whole process from a VPS (e.g., GSC) running on the grid.

Alternatively, you can also keep the last few versions of the appliance in the catalog, under different name -- e.g., GIZMOv4, GIZMOv5 -- and use class copy of the desired version to GIZMO -- even though simplistic, this is probably the easiest way to get the versioning in. It will also allow you to easily change the version of the appliance for any particular application (or several apps) without affecting the others.

We are planning to change the class import mechanism to bypass the impex volume and import directly to the catalog. scp/sftp as well as http[s] and ftp are the protocols we have in mind to do the import. I will add a note to consider direct import from SVN (but then why only SVN?). Since this will be a "get" (as opposed to "checkout" - I think SVN is one of the few that don't make the distinction), having access to the right version of the target files over http(s) may be best -- I think ViewVC may be able to provide that for SVN).

Catalog versioning is an area we are likely to expand in the future; any use cases will help come with a better solution.

Best Regards,
-- Peter