Keeping Resources Up To Date

cotton31 · 12 Feb 2013 at 12:22

Not sure where else to ask this.

Do you keep a local copy of resources for different projects or just download it again?

For example, do you keep a download of Wordpress, or a library you often include in a .Net project?

If so, how do you keep these up to date? Obviously Wordpress is quite an easy one as it's a big project and the url is easy to remember, but is there a way to manage this for more obscure resources?

Cheers,

cotton31 · 12 Feb 2013 at 13:59

No idea why I posted this here...could a mod move it to HTML, Graphics & Programming please?

I wondered why I couldn't find it!

fez · 12 Feb 2013 at 17:48

Just download a new copy most of the time. Pretty much everything I use is updated on a reasonably regular basis and distributed via git so its very easy to get the lastest versions.

Other than that, CDN's help a lot and at the end of the day, I am not starting more than a few new projects a week so the 5 minutes to download and setup is never too much of a drain.

RobH · 12 Feb 2013 at 22:18

Might not quite be what you're after but in terms of Java there is a build tool called Maven which I quite like and it's used for dependency (library) management amongst other things. Your project has a single configuration file (known as pom.xml) which states any libraries it requires such as "Spring Framework 3.2" (a nice Java framework). Maven will then check your local repository (on your computer), a listed repository (such as one hosted on your network) or a public repository (hosted by various organisations) to find the library. When a new version of the library is released it's just a case of changing a version number in your project's configuration file and it will be downloaded. By default, Maven stores copies of any libraries you've used in a local repository but you could set up a central one on a network which holds a copy for you or anyone else on the network to use. This means that if you are working on multiple projects with the same library you can just reference the one copy.

We use this at work, for example the Oracle JDBC driver (database driver for Java) is not available in a Maven repository, you can only download a JAR file for it. We upload it to the repository on our network, reference it in our project and then it's available to anyone who checks out our code on our network. This means we don't store libraries under version control.

Not sure what's around for .Net scene or others but Maven can be quite useful and does work with things like Adobe/Apache Flex as well.

Pho · 13 Feb 2013 at 00:09

For local development I'd just check things like WordPress out from their source control. Infact, the news feed and wiki page on my old companies site is just a checkout of their respective SVN repos which gets pulled from time to time to update it.

With .NET then most libraries tend to be in Nuget nowdays so it's pretty simple to just launch an update check in that. If it's not in Nuget then I checkout the libraries repository if possible.

Probably not pretty compared to Maven etc but works well for what we need: for everything else we tend to have a shared assemblies repo which we map to A: drive (map a network drive to \\127.0.0.1\[assemblies repo path]). Then when referencing that DLL in Visual Studio make sure you use the A: path and it keeps updated when you make changes to those assemblies, and other people can build the project without annoying reference missing errors. Infact you can use it to host a local Nuget feed too, simple

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