thinking in geek tagline’s are so web2.0

Crappystrano

Note: After I started this series Jeremy Miller has posted a very relevant article about source code hygiene issues.

(This is the third part in a series – you should probably read part one and two first.)

Today I’ll present a sanitised copy of my deployment script. I’ve based the design of deploy.cmd on Capistrano¹ . The script is nicknamed “Crappystrano”. Here’s the output (pretty htmlized source is here):

>deploy.cmd

Crappystrano – the shit script which (sort of) deploys stuff

deploy.cmd staging|live [branchpath]

Here’s breakdown of the steps² – skipping some error checking³. :

1. Do we have the required dependencies⁴ on the path? If we don’t copy them to the path if they’re just 1 exe – otherwise exit with an error.
2. Check the command line parameters. We must have the environment we’re releasing to? Are we releasing from the trunk or from a SVN branch?
3. Construct a release time stamp. This is YYYYMMDDHHMMSSMS.
4. Perform a “svn export” from the trunk/branch to %tmp%\staging|live%timestamp%. [E]
5. Use msbuild to build the solution. [E]
6. Rearrange the folder structure so we only get the artefacts we need in the release package.
7. Zip up the release package using the environment name + time stamp.
8. move the release package back to the root directory of the project and delete the export from %tmp%.
9. Make a SVN tag (svn copy trunk/branch /tags/environment-timestamp).

I’ve uploaded a zip file with the script and folder structure + a little readme. This is not the best way of doing things – it’s just a very lightweight way. Comments, questions, feedback etc… are gratefully received.

1. http://www.capify.org/ – I know some people are going to say – just use Capistrano. There are two reasons for me not to: 1. I’m the only person in my team familiar with Ruby. 2. Even if you argue that they don’t need to understand ruby to run a cap deployment recipe – they still have to have it installed. It’s just yet another dependency which I’m not willing to take currently. [↩]
2. This is all simplified as the actual script supports a SaaS product which has multiple instances – one per client [↩]
3. noted with [E] [↩]
4. gnu zip.exe, svn [↩]