How to auto-deploy web-app

Question

I'm trying to make sense on the best way to do automatize a series of things in a row in order to deploy a web-app and haven't yet came up with a suitable solution. I would like to:

1. use google's compiler.jar to minify my JS
2. use yahoo's yui-compressor.jar to minify my CSS
3. access a file and change a string so that header files like "global.css?v=21" get served the correct version
4. deploy the app (sftp, mercurial or rsync?) omitting certain directories like "/userfiles"

Can you guys put me on the right track to solve this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

you may want to check out phing http://phing.info/ (they are in the process of moving servers so may be down this weekend), but it can do all of what you are wanting and is written in php. A quick google search should bring up plenty of tutorials to get you started.

Answer 2

You can run php from the command line to do all sorts of fun things.

$ php script_name.php arg1 arg2

See: command line, argv, argc, exec

Running PHP from the command line is very fast. I've been doing this a lot lately for various automation tasks.