Best methods/tools/practices for releasing of a web based application

Question

So I'm starting a web project from scratch on PHP/Zend Framework/SVN, and want to start it very structured. I know all about SVN branching, having a development branch, hot fix branch etc. (well at least I think I do).

My question is what's the best method to release new version of my software in the future, instead of just doing an svn update. For ex. deploy the new version to a test server for staging before releasing to production and such sort of things. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

As step 1, I wouldn't use a tool built to manage source code versioning for deployment, I'd recommend a tool that can manage/deploy releases for that purpose :)

I am a support analyst for BuildMaster, a tool which does exactly what you need (and it's free for you if you have a team of <= 5 people).

Answer 2

It really depends how your infrastructure looks like. If you are deploying to a lot of nodes I think using BitTorrent is a good choice