Rollback for Production deployment

Question

Im about to automate the deployment to a test-server and to the production.

I have a ci-server (build, compile, junit) and a artifact repository manager (stores the builds to deploy/publish).

Currently I can deploy with a script to the test-server (executed with the ci-server). No rollback, db-backups or db-updates currently. All servers have Suse (linux).

I want to know if there is a better way to deploy, with rollback - ability? Maybe a other freeware tool? Otherwise even just some notes would be helpful to figure out what i have to do to be able to make rollbacks and dont mess up the production.

Answer 1

Rolling back an application which includes a relational database is very tricky. Traditionally this is done by restoring from a backup, performed prior to the upgrade.

A more modern approach is to integrate a database migration tool, like liquibase, into your application's installation procedure. liquibase tracks each change to your database's schema which enables it to generate scripts for both upgrade and rollback.