thinking in geek tagline’s are so web2.0

Automated deployment == CI for Operations

Deployment is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I’m almost always the guy who gets to debug production problems, deployment problems and generally wears a developer + infrastructure hat.¹

When it comes to web applications - most teams don’t bother automating their deployment processes. This is something that I think is in the process of changing² - but is not yet a generally accepted practice on a par with TDD, user stories or iterations.

At a minimum - it should be possible to:

1. Issue a single command which creates a release package for your project. (i.e. built, tested, tagged in subversion and zipped up). For me - this tool/command is called: deploy.cmd and is just a batch file.
2. Issue another command in your deployment environment which will configure the new release. (i.e. update IIS root, upgrade the database, update connection strings + any other configuration required).

In my current project I’ve built 1. For me 2 does not exist as a single command line (It’s currently a combination of several tools - this should be changed!).

In my next post I’ll outline my very simple solution for this. Just to get the conversation started.

1. Ten years ago - part of my job was building deployment packages for desktop applications (this is pre MSI). Identifying all the dependencies of an app and scripting them into an install package and testing the deployment was at times almost a full time job. [↩]
2. there have been a couple of good threads about this on the altnetconf mailing list [↩]