The adage has it that if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. I have two deployment methods on my current live systems and they both “work” in that I can do deployments with some confidence.
For reference the two methods are:
- Build a nice zipped package of things to deploy (copy into the live folder) on my build server (as an artifact) download, unzip (I have a script to do this), check and xcopy.
- Deploy a website by SVN update.
These both work, but neither is without issues and there are far too many steps with the former and for the latter in one case I need to remember to build (and commit) to deploy.
The biggest problem comes if one needs to deploy several things at once (and usually early in the morning) that the processes are to varying degrees manual means they’re both slow and there is potential for error (this is true any time you’re attempting to deploy under pressure). This has bitten me recently…
So its become clear that I need to do better – lots more automation and *cough* a bit more testing (especially something to give me confidence that the newly deployed code is running nicely – never mind working right, working at all is your first test)
The other thing is that the world has moved on a bit recently – this is covered by Scott Hanselman in his post and video Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong and so not only do I need a better deployment story but its easy (or at least it should be!) to write one. So here we go…
Comments