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.

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

I concur -- set your svn tree up, and use rsync over ssh to copy the tree out to the remote locations. rsync will make it fast and efficient, only copying changes rather than full files.

You want to export your svn tree to some directory, then rsync from there to the remote host's directory tree.

Answer 7

I also forgot to mention that if you use rsync, you can set up rsync to use ssh, so you will only transfer the files that have changed, saving on time and bandwidth.

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

I had marked a post on how to deploy your websites using Subversion : http://blog.lavablast.com/post/2008/02/I2c-for-one2c-welcome-our-new-revision-control-overlords!.aspx

Answer 10

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 11

Capistrano setup is just too complicated. We found that KwateeSDCM was very straightforward to use with a simple web interface and no scripting. We've got our deployment configuration done in no time for Dev and QA configuration on windows and linux servers.