Calling all Mac SVN users! Cornerstone is looking for private beta testers of their version control for the Mac. We’re pretty big fans of the subversion client ourselves and the guys over at Zennaware agreed to let us extend 25 free private beta invites to you, our beloved blog followers.

Get your Beta Invite Now!

About Zennaware
Website: zennaware.com
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Founded: 2008

Zennaware is a small independent software developer focusing on high quality applications exclusively for Apple’s Mac OS X.

Today we announced our partnership with Joyent, provider of smart cloud computing solutions, to provide end-to-end automation of the application development and deployment process. Joyent helps web and SaaS companies host and scale their mission-critical applications (for example, check out this cool video about LinkedIn). 

“Codesion’s new push-button publishing feature makes it faster and easier for our customers to collaborate, manage and deploy their apps directly to the Joyent cloud,” said David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent. “Coupled with Joyent’s scalable smart computing architectures, our partnership with Codesion allows for unmatched ease in developing and deploying the next generation of social and gaming applications on the web.” 

Learn how you can one-click deploy and host your web application directly from your Codesion code repository to Joyent using Codesion Publisher.  

Join Us! Hear from the Codesion and Joyent VP’s of Product at: 

Webinar: Expert Insights to Deploying in the Cloud

Hurry! The first 50 people to register and attend will receive a Free 1GB Joyent hosting account, valid for 3 months.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 10am PDT
Reserve Your Spot Now!

We’ve just updated all of our Subversion servers to the latest version of Subversion - 1.6.12. This version contains a bunch of bug fixes and improvements to merging (svn merge — reintegrate). As with all Subversion releases it’s backwards compatible, and we’ve tested it with all major SVN clients, so no need to rush out and upgrade your client tool.

Every piece of code, content, or web page has a final destination where it is displayed or consumed.  In this series, I want to go through the simplest and easiest ways to publish your code to its destination, whether its hosted or cloud servers.

I’ll stick to simple publishing scenarios like FTP or copying files in this article.  But, stay tuned for part two for advanced publishing methods that handle rollbacks and historical deployment tracking.

Exporting your code or content

Whether you are using SVN or Git, there are some steps you need to be aware of before you copy your code to a production or test environment.

First, you’ll want to get a copy of your content from the repository. Here are some examples:

SVN: 

svn checkout, svn export

GIT: 

git archive, git clone

The main issue here is that when you use svn checkout or git clone, a hidden folder of .svn or .git will also be created.  This folder contains repository information that you do not want to expose via the web or your production environments.  Of course, there are ways to configure your web server so that the .svn and .git directories are not viewable, but the safest method is to NOT publish those directories.  

With that said, for optimum security, I’d recommend using the following:

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On US PT 8/17/2010 9:00 AM, we will be updating the SSL certificate on all of our SVN servers.  This is a scheduled and routine maintenance that may affect all Codesion customers and trial users with subversion projects.

Business Impact

Some SVN clients do not bundle a list of trusted Certificate Authorities.  Therefore, due to this SSL certificate change, you may need to re-accept the SSL certificate information.  You may get a prompt like:

You can manually validate our certificate information with the following Fingerprint:

C6:0A:10:4E:87:9A:35:65:5E:E1:D3:FB:74:D0:E9:D4:58:72:6D:56

Choose to “accept permanently” and you can continue to use the service.

Support

If you need assistance, please visit help.codesion or email support.

Codesion Publisher provides simplified, one-click publishing of your source code to any hosted or cloud server, including Amazon S3 and the Google App Engine.

To make management of your publishing targets and recipes easier, we have released the Publisher Tab, which gives you a single view of all your projects enabled for deployment.

We’ve moved the IP Whitelist and Block HTTP security features under the “Security” tab within your Codesion account (previously located under the “Services” tab). 

IP Whitelist

IP Whitelist allows an administrator to specify a list of IP addresses that can access Codesion services.  For example, if you specify 98.234.218.159 as the IP Address in the whitelist, then ONLY a computer from 98.234.218.159 IP address can access Codesion services.  This is useful to lock down your access to a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses.

Block HTTP

All URLs for accessing Codesion services are set to HTTPS:// by default.  However, we don’t prevent customers from using HTTP://.  If you want to shut down HTTP:// access, you can check off “block HTTP access”, and only allow HTTPS:// access to your account.

Both features are available exclusively to our Professional Edition customers. Want to check them out? Sign up for a free 30 day trial.  

One of our goals is to deliver you the most secure and reliable enterprise grade platform.  In line with this we are now officially PCI compliant as defined by the Security Standards Council. The PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements originally designed to ensure that all companies who process, store, or transmit credit card data maintain a secure environment. However, these strict standards can also be applied to the storage of your source code.

The high-level requirements include:

1. Building and maintaining a secure network
2. Protecting user data
3. Maintaining a vulnerability management program
4. Implementing strong access control measures
5. Regularly monitoring and testing networks
6. Maintaining an information security policy

The audit included a rigorous test of our servers and indicated the severity level of any potential breach, with 1 being the least severe and 5 being the most severe. Codesion achieved a top rating with no potential severe breaches.  All our servers will continue to undergo a quarterly audit as part of maintaining this status.

Screenshot from Codesion’s McAfee PCI report 

Codesion Git customers can now enjoy hosted Gitweb. Using Gitweb you can browse directory trees at arbitrary revisions, view contents of files (blobs), see log or shortlog of a given branch, examine commits, commit messages and changes made by a given commit. Gitweb can generate feeds in RSS or Atom format. You can get any given version of a file; if not disabled you can download a snapshot of a given version of a project (project tree at given revision). You can search (if it is not disabled) for commits by an author, added to repository by a comitter, commit with commit message (commit description) which includes some text.

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We’ve had many requests for a simple way to disable a user from accessing Codesion services, without having to rearrange carefully designed granular permissions lists. In response, we are happy to announce our new “Disable User” feature. This augments our focus on security and control by allowing account administrators to disable a user from accessing any of our services via the “People” tab in the Codesion application.

This feature comes in handy if you need to immediately disable a user from accessing all services under your account for security reasons, without actually deleting them from our system, along with all their details, e.g. ACLs (Access Control Lists), tickets, and commit history. When you are satisfied that the security risk has passed, you can easily re-enable their user account, and everything will continue to operate as per normal. Note that disabled users still count towards your user quota.

Fig 1: Disable a user from accessing any Codesion hosted service  by clicking “Disable” from the “People” tab (note: you need to be an account administrator).  

We appreciate your feedback and like hearing from our users, and believe you have the best ideas of how to improve our service! If you have any feature requests or ideas, please come join us and feel free to participate here (you’ll need to sign into your Codesion account first).