How to release web applications?

Question

I don\'t really know how to perform deployment from offline development to live webserver correctly in web development. I mostly resort on intuition, but this is more or less wh

Answer 1

I recommend leveraging SVN export instead of checkout. This way, you will not expose any of the SVN files to the world. It also generally creates a cleaner folder structure.

I have leveraged rsync before when moving files between stage and production.

My typical deployment proceeds as follows:

• backup production site
• Restore from backup to stage server
• Lock the server down from all external IP addresses
• Export the code from the repository into a temp folder (optionally diff the two folders for small changes)
• rsyc files from the temp folder to the stage server folder
• Validate that only the files you expect to have changed have actually changed.
• Apply SQL scripts to the DB
• Test the upgrade
• Unlock the webserver

Now, to deploy to production, replay these steps in fast forward. Using scripts make it much easier.