What is a good deployment tool for websites on Windows?

Question

I'm looking for something that can copy (preferably only changed) files from a development machine to a staging machine and finally to a set of production machines.

A "what if" mode would be nice as would the capability to "rollback" the last deployment. Database migrations aren't a necessary feature.

UPDATE: A free/low-cost tool would be great, but cost isn't the only concern. A tool that could actually manage deployment from one environment to the next (dev->staging->production instead of from a development machine to each environment) would also be ideal.

The other big nice-to-have is the ability to only copy changed files - some of our older sites contain hundreds of .asp files.

Answer 1

@Sean Carpenter can you tell us a little more about your environment? Should the solution be free? simple?

I find robocopy to be pretty slick for this sort of thing. Wrap in up in a batch file and you are good to go. It's a glorified xcopy, but deploying my website isn't really hard. Just copy out the files.

As far as rollbacks... You are using source control right? Just pull the old source out of there. Or, in your batch file, ALSO copy the deployment to another folder called website yyyy.mm.dd so you have a lovely folder ready to go in an emergency.

look at the for command for details on how to get the parts of the date.

robocopy.exe
for /?

Yeah, it's a total "hack" but it moves the files nicely.