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

You should consider some deployment scripts to automate all this. it will help prevent you from making mistakes. SQL upgrade scripts are a way of life, but you should always test them on a copy of the live database before you run them on them on the real one.

What you might consider having is a staging server. You do your local changes, then svn checkout to the staging server and run your upgrade scripts there as well. You do your acceptance test on the staging server. When everything is good, you deploy everhting to the live server. This should be as simple as running some scripts. i.e. update-staging.pl and update-prod.pl.

You can make your sql script easier to automate by adding a version table to your db. whenever you create an update script, you tag it with a version. then the deployment script can look at the version of your update script, and the version of the database and apply the updates as needed. this also makes restoring from backups feasible. If you have made changes, then restore to a backup, you just run your upgrade script and it goes through and updates the db to the current version.