[consulting] DBScripts, sharp tools, change management.

[Christian Pearce]

Hi All, 

I am getting ready improve my toolset again. First I am planning on getting on board drush and drush make, nothing much to really talk about there. Secondly I am looking to move to git. I have had a really good run with Subversion and some scripts I wrote to manage upstream source and merging them into my sites using a vendor branches. But I like git more and a lot of my fellow contractors and developers are grumbling at me. Next I am going to improve my deployment process to be more automated using something like cap or chef. Lastly I want to nail down what I can do about developing changes in development with others, tracking those changes and pushing them to production. This is sort of the meat of the matter for me at the moment. So let's break it down. 

1. Getting on board with drush and drush make, seems simple enough my fellow colleague has already put together a base profile that we can clone out of git, make what ever additions we want to the starter and check it back in. What sort of things are people really loving about drush? Or go to haves? I want to get more savy with pulling in the production database. 
2. Git - I really love the fact I can clone Drupal from the git repo out on github. But I want to get the modules pulling from git or using submodule and grabbing it from cvs off of drupal. Ideally I can just write some automation scripts to perform security updates automatically and only report if there is a conflict. I have read and tinkered extensively and couldn't get a workflow that worked correctly. Grant it I could just be to stupid with Git. Does anyone have a workflow they like that is documented on a blog? Please I have see the really basic stuff I don't need that. 
3. Automation is in my wheelhouse, but I am curious are people using capistrano? or chef? puppet? my instincts are to use capistrano, I think one of the local (LA?) drupal camps put a website out with a deploy.rb script. I was going to check that out. 
4. This is the big one, I have been reading up on deploy, exports, features, etc. Ultimately I want to start packing the repeatable work I do into features. All the systems I look at are just no stable or active or complete enough to commit too. I also look at DBscripts and was super excited till I read how merging working in production and started to cringe. I think it is valuable, but I am not 100% committed to making changes in development and checking them in all the time. Plus dealing with CCK schema changes, ugh. But it might come to that, ideally if I can get all my other tools super sharp that it isn't a time suck to do so. What are people doing to handle this? I am so sick of making changes in beta and promoted them by hand into production. 

-- 
Christian Pearce 
xforty technologies 
888-231-9331 x1119 
http://xforty.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/attachments/20100423/029a0203/attachment.html