Friday Favorite: Coda + Versions + Beanstalk

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Robert tells us about his favorite Web development tools.

It's no secret that I heart Coda. I've been in love with the one-window web development app since the day it came out. It turns out, though, that I was just scratching the surface of using Coda until I signed up for my new favorite web service: Beanstalk.

Beanstalk is a service that hosts your version control repositories remotely. This is great for far-flung team members with firewalls and other networking hurdles between them. Having a zero-configuration Subversion repository available no matter where you're working is hot stuff.

Best of all, Beanstalk publishes items committed to the repository to my team's development server automatically. It's just like it lives on our network.

To make Beanstalk work with Coda, I first had to check out a copy of the repository with Versions. Versions is still in beta (and Christina has written about it before), but its ease of use is unparalleled. In fact, it has Beanstalk in mind, with shortcuts to help you connect with your Beanstalk repositories.

With the repo downloaded, it's just a matter of setting it up as a site in Coda, and entering my username and password for Beanstalk. Coda does all the heavy lifting from then on. Committing changes and adding files is as easy as clicking an icon in the same position as if I was uploading it (and not using Subversion). I love that it keeps my muscle memory working for me, and not against me.

Coda is $99, Versions is free (while it's in beta), and Beanstalk starts at $15 per month (which is the plan I have). Put together, though, it's a million-dollar solution.

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Source: http://panic.com/

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Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like...

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DarthSnuggles

Ok, maybe this is a n00b question, but in glancing over Coda, I can't in a million years figure out why I would want to use it over Eclipse. Can someone explain the killer feature/intended audience?

October 26 2008 at 7:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rob Meidal

I recommend Unfuddle. for subversion hosting. Their free account allows up to 200MB and comes with built in issue tracking. The interface is really nice as well. Check it out at http://unfuddle.com.

It also includes the up and coming GIT if you would like to check out the future of version control.

October 26 2008 at 7:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tomson

One more alternative to Beanstalk and Springloops: http://www.versionshelf.com/

October 25 2008 at 7:15 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex

great article :) I just wish I had a web host with svn support.

a heads up to anyone with their own server, warehouse is a really cool subversion browser on rails: www.warehouseapp.com

October 24 2008 at 5:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jash Sayani

I love Versions... Waiting for it to come out of Beta......

October 24 2008 at 4:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Jash Sayani's comment

Frank

If you like Version you will love Cornerstone:
http://www.zennaware.com/cornerstone/
and it's already out of Beta.

if you're only looking for a SVN client that's the way to go in my opinion...

Otherwise, I agree with the article and really recommend Coda

October 27 2008 at 6:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mr. anyonmous

Am using the exact same setup. And I love it!

Beanstalk + Twitter + Basecamp = unbelievably awesome.

October 24 2008 at 1:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tåkelur

Homer would never drool over those plants though :)

October 24 2008 at 1:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Drew

I've found www.springloops.com to be much more reliable than beanstalk. Otherwise this is the exact setup I have. Cudos.

October 24 2008 at 1:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Geoff

I'd rather see Coda have built-in integration with Git and Github. THAT would be awesome. SVN is painful after getting used to Git.

October 24 2008 at 11:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ian Beck

Though it's a fantastic service, I don't use Beanstalk (why bother when my MediaTemple hosting has far more disk space than I'll ever approach using?), but I've added MAMP to the mix. The way I work is to create a working copy in my Documents folder with Versions where I track everything; the website, PSDs (which I often don't version), tags/snapshots, etc. Then I just check out the root of the site with Coda into my sites folder and use MAMP Pro to setup http://sitename:8888/ for local testing (if it's PHP; straight HTML I might just work out of the original working copy).

This works great because I get the more advanced SVN capabilities of Versions (timeline in particular) while still making use of the SVN capabilities of Coda in my update/publish workflow. The only downside is I have to remember to keep everything up to date if for whatever reason I save something to the non-Coda working copy, but this is just a matter of remembering to push the update button whenever I load up Versions.

Incidentally, for anyone out there who wants to use Coda's all-in-one sweetness, but can't stomach its sub-par text editing, I've developed a bundle of Applescripts to help make Coda better called the Textmate Emulation Applescripts for Coda:

http://beckism.com/tea_for_coda/

October 24 2008 at 11:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply