Why nightly / daily builds?

[tdnxxx444]

I was wondering what were the advantages and purposes for doing a nightly build as opposed to just building as you go? Currently, I was just thinking of moving the files from the staging server to the production server once testing was complete instead of having to wait to move it every night.

Also, I saw that people have discussed various methods for doing their builds including rsync or doing a svn update. What does everyone think is the best method?

[Mittineague]

I think the daily builds are where they ARE building as they go. On projects where there are lots of contributors it's best to catch any bugs sooner rather than later so the problem can more easily be isolated. If you make 10 changes a day and wait until the end of the month you have 300 changes to look into instead of 10. If you're the only one making changes I guess you could do it when you wanted to.

[ethanp]

It does depend on the project. With some larger projects (Firefox is a good example) nightly builds work good. They allow the community to keep up with the updates and give them a test run, submit back bugs, etc.

However, with smaller applications there is no reason to do a nightly build. Maybe a weekly or monthly build though. Still, if you do a lot of development it is nice to have a CVS repository to track updates, but I see no reason to actually build each day (although you could for backups or something).

[tdnxxx444]

Actually, I'm actually talking about web site development, where a user may want to see the results live right away. Would we just want to build as we go, or should we also do nightly builds also.

[Mittineague]

You're talking about whether or not to post your pages online as you finish them, or to wait until the site is "finished"? I have heard arguments that it is better to wait SEO-wise because if google spiders the incomplete site it won't index the new pages right away. But I don't think that's a valid argument. I wouldn't post any buggy pages, but I have seen many sites that have links to pages that say "coming soon". I'd say as long as you have enough done so that users can benefit, and you're reasonably sure you won't make any drastic changes, go for it. Bear in mind that users may bookmark pages and you don't want to do a slew of htaccess editing later on to take care of renamed/removed pages.