I have noticed when working on my own projects outside of work I tend to put files haphazardly in various folder in my home directory. Now that I am starting to work on web related projects, I needed to come up with a sane system for file management. This is an outline of how I did it. Your mileage may vary.

Start with a main projects folder, doesn't matter what you call it, but all your projects will go in here. I'll call mine /home/steve/projects, or ~/projects in shorthand. This folder is put under subversion revision control on my shared hosting account. It is a self-contained repository that contains server deployment scripts, project files and everything else I need. Read on/

I have a project called 'test' so that appears in the ~/projects/test folder. In the ~/project folder I have the deploy script 'update_test.sh' which looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
rsync -avCz --delete test/ username@myserver.com:/home/username/test.myserver.com/

This rsync command has the -C option which ignores .svn and CVS folders. It also has the --delete option which deletes files on the target folder that don't exist in the source folder. The other are standard: -a for archive mode, -z for compression, and -v to make the output show you what is going on. Also, when devising your rsync deploy command it is wise to add the --dry-run command which, when coupled with -v, will show you how the files would be updated without actually changing anything. Rsync is a powerful command which can cause a lot of damage, especially with the --delete option activated.

Right now, I am using Netbeans 6.7 M2 as an IDE. It has has excellent PHP / HTML support. When I create the netbeans project, I tell netbeans to put the metadata in a separate folder. I created a folder called ~/project/netbeans to hold all Netbeans project files. This way the project files are kept under subversion control like everything else but are not included in the server deploy.