Best Practices for Code/Web Application Deployment?

Question

I would love to hear ideas on how to best move code from development server to production server.

A list of gotcha\'s, don\'t do this list would be helpful.

Answer 1

Check out Ant or Maven - these are build and deployment tools used in the Java world which can help you copy / ftp files, backup and even check out code from SVN.

You can automate your deployment steps using these tools, for example Ant will allow you declare a set of tasks as part of your deployment. So you could, for example:

1. Check out a revision using SVNAnt or similar to a directory
2. Copy (and perhaps zip first) these files to a backup directory
3. FTP all the files to your web server(s)
4. Create a report to email to the team illustrating the deployment

Really you can do almost anything you wish to put time into using Ant. Maven is a little more strucutred (and newer) and you can see a discussion of the differences here.

Hope that helps!