Deploying to multiple servers

Question

I have to deploy my php/html/css/etc code to multiple servers and i am looking at my options for software that allows easy and secure deployment to multiple servers.

Answer 1

If you're running on Redhat or Debian, consider packaging up your code into RPM's or Debs. Then build a yum or dpkg repository and put your packages there. You can then use your system's package management to do upgrades/rollbacks, etc. You can even use puppet to automate the process.

If you want to tie it into subversion, you can create a branch for each new version. Use the commit scripts to build the RPM's when a new branch shows up in a directory.

Answer 2

I'll second Capistrano. It's incredibly powerful and flexible. Our current project uses Capistrano for deploying to different servers as well as multiple servers. We pass two arguments to the cap command: 1) the name of the set of machine specific config options to run and 2) the name of the action to run

ends up looking like this:

cap -f deploy.rb live deploy

or

cap -f deploy.rb dev deploy

Of course the default use case - deploy to lots of machines at once - is a doddle with Capistrano AND you don't need to have Capistrano on the machines you are deploying to. All in all, tasty technology.

Answer 3

Capistrano is pretty handy for that. There's a few people using it (1, 2, 3) for deploying PHP code as evidenced by doing a quick search.

Answer 4

I found capistrano to be very easy to use once it's setup. The configuration file can be a bit confusing at first for more complicated environments but it soon becomes worthwhile. I deploy to 14 servers on production. I also use multiple environments for deployment to a staging server. One quirk, there's a bug in Ruby that breaks parallel deployment but serially isn't too bad with svn exports.

Answer 5

I've used Automated Build Studio before for a similar task. It gives you a lot of flexibility in what you can do.

Answer 6

You can also use kwateeSDCM which is free and allows remote installation via ssh. It also enables you to manage server-specific configuration from a central location and make upgrades seemless.