Deployment

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Deployment

Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use

• copy/clone code base to server
• run composer commands
• migrate your database
• reload the web server
• notify about the deployment
• and so on...

Deployment Goals

One-click / command deployment

Anytime & Anywhere

Anyone (with permission) can deploy

Nominal/No downtime (ZDD - zero downtime deployment)

Reliable Rollbacks

Pushed code to production, recalled there was a critical bug

Reusable and should be reproducible (repeatable)

Scalable

Benefits of Automated Deployment

Deployments become much less error-prone

compared to this...

Anyone in the team with permission can deploy software

Engineers will spend most of their time developing software

and not have to face this kind of situation...

Deploying to somewhere new is not a headache

You can release features more frequently as its easy, automated and reproducible

Capistrano

A remote server automation and deployment tool written in Ruby

Originally a tool for deploying code

Evolved into remote multi-server automation tool

Uses SSH

Does everything in parallel

Support these VCS out of the box

• Git 1.8 or higher
• Mercurial
• SVN

Easy to integrate with PHP projects

We @ YIPL chose capistrano because it is popular and most importantly fits for our use-case

Requirements

Ruby >= 1.9.3

SSH access to all servers,

Terminology

• Task
• Recipe
• Namespace
• Role
• Stages

Task

A concrete set of commands to execute.

Recipe

A collection of tasks.

Namespace

Organizes tasks within recipes and

avoids naming collisions

Role

Servers can have different roles like

app

demo

web

Stages

Refers to each environment being a stage like dev, staging, testing, production.

Usually means different set of servers.

Can also include configuration per stage.

Or even different tasks.