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.

Also helps if it could be tied into my SVN.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

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 2

Setting up password-less publickey authentication with ssh would allow you to scp your files to any of your servers very quickly (or be automated by a shell script).

Here's a simple tutorial: http://rcsg-gsir.imsb-dsgi.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/documents/internet/node31.html

Answer 3

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 4

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.