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

for small, php-based systems, what we used to do is this:

for code changes, we use an ant script running from eclipse that compares the local (dev) system with the remote (qa/prod/whatever) systems, then zips all the changed files, scp the zip to the remote system and unzip it on the target. Of course we have automated backup and the like. If this is of interest I would be able to post an example script in the next few days.

for sql changes, we try to maintain a scripts for each change (usually in our bug-tracker) and manually run each change on the target system.

for large systems you shoudl really use something more robust.

note that if your prod system is pulling directly from svn then you are deplolying changes that might have not been tested properly (you might forget to commit something, test you local system, and everything would break in prod...)