creatingArchive

To build an archive, first click Build a New Archive.

Choose the top folder of your project. By default, cascade will show the root directory, but change this to whatever folder is appropriate for the project you are working on. This directory will be stored in the archive (as the build directory) and will be used later on for suggestions for deployment directories (which is useful if you build and deploy to the same configuration of servers).

You can choose to exclude certain file extensions if you want, just provide a comma delimited list of extensions. This looks purely at the characters after the last period in the filename, not at mime-types.

By default, cascade will hide files and directories that start with a period, such as ignore files, version control folders and settings files. If you want to show these files, check the "Include Hidden Files and Directories" checkbox.

Once you are seeing a list of the files in the directory, you can choose to either only select the individual files you have changed, or you can select all of the files for the project. Which one depends on your situation, but as a general rule, if your project isn't too large, it is better to include all of the files for a project. This is a great way to backup and "version" your project, and makes diffs much easier later on if it ever becomes necessary.

Once you have your files chosen, click the select files and continue button at the bottom of the form.

A listing of all of the files chosen will be at the top, and at the bottom of the page you will see a form asking you for the details of the archive.

Note: Archives, by nature are immutable; that is, once built, you cannot edit the files or metadata associated with an archive. If you build an archive wrong, the answer is to delete it and rebuild it. This is necessary for security reasons, especially when users certify a particular archive. So pay close attention to the values you fill out in this form.

None of these values though have any certain format that is expected, although it is suggested that you come up with standards for your team. All of these values will be searchable after you build the archive, so more information means you will have an easier time finding an archive later on.

Version numbers in particular are highly subjective, on our team we have different schemes depending on the project. Some applications use a 1.2.3 type scheme, other applications that are changed more frequently use a date-revision scheme, such as 20120304-002, which would be the second revision on march fourth. Whichever scheme you choose, it is best to stick with the same scheme within a project.

For deployment directories, put the paths where you expect that this project may be deployed, one per line. If you expect that the archive may be deployed to a variety of different configurations, you can have as many as you want. Some examples from my own projects where we work with both local windows development machines and linux servers would be:

c:\home\html\cascade /var/www/html/cascade

No matter what you put in this box though, the person deploying the archive can always choose to deploy it to any directory they choose. As you will see later on though, if a suggested deployment directory exists when deploying the archive, it will let the user know.

If you are creating an archive by clicking rebuild on an already existing archive, the files in the previous archive, and only those files, will be preselected for you. You can always add or remove files from the new archive though. You will also see an option on the archive details form to "mark previous archive as obsolete". This will mark the archive that you are "rebuilding" as obsolete, which will prevent it from showing up when browsing archives, although it can still be found by searching. This helps you keep the latest version of an archive easily identifiable.

Once you create the archive, you will be taken to the archive detail screen. For more information on it, click here.