How to do deployment for php application

Question

I am currently developing a php-application for a charity organization and I am now in the stage of defining the deployment practices.

Our application is using both Zend

Answer 1

I'd start by making the application root of the various servers an SVN working copy. You can add in mod_rewrite (or IIRF ASAPI filters for IIS) rules to ensure people can't address your .svn directories directly.

Then, updating to the latest source can be as simple as an SVN update. For your database update needs, I'd maintain the database modification scripts also in SVN. You'll likely need to wrap the SVN update in a batch/shell script in order to perform the database updates after the scripts are downloaded.

For change management on the live servers, I'd also have their working copies not of trunk, but a release branch. You can merge trunk into the release branch when you are ready for a release. This will allow you to test the deploy and make sure it's solid before performing it on the live servers. It also has the nice side-effect of giving you a nice replica of the site-release versions in case you need to track down issues post-launch.

Lastly, depending on the intensity and timing of these updates, you may also want to have your update script flip an "under maintenance" switch so that users are temporarily met with a proper message rather than a broken site.