[support] Best way to deploy Drupal.

[Unai Rodriguez]

Dear Kathleen,

Thank you so much for your reply.

I guess we would like our deployment process to be somewhat similar to 
what we use in other projects; a number of developers are writing code 
while testing on their local machine first (aka developer sandbox). 
Each developer's machine has a web server and database server with a 
copy of the code. Once a developer is sure that her stuff is working 
fine on her sandbox that is the time when she will commit it into our 
version control system (i.e. we use subversion).

We have a server that takes care of the automated deployments. That is, 
any developer can access a web-based interface, input her user/password 
and click one button. This button will deploy the build which is 
currently on the trunk in subversion and put it into the development 
server; also some other things will take place like copying the proper 
settings.php file (in drupal's case) to the proper server(s).

From the web-based interface a developer can deploy to any of the 3 
environments: development, staging or production. Usually development 
is where developers test (plus their sandboxes). Our Quality Assurance 
team takes care of testing the staging and production servers. That 
means deployments to these two environments are more controlled.

The deployment process is automated, meaning, you can push the code to 
any environment upon clicking one button. The process takes care of 
deploying the right code in the right place plus the configuration 
files (in this case settings.php).

We have been doing this for a while, I think is pretty standard.

Now, for Drupal is different since part of the "settings" are stored in 
the database, right? We are having a hard time getting the database 
settings to be applied over to the next environment (i.e. development 
to staging or staging to production).

I have been testing the deploy module which is able to do something 
like this... My question is more along the lines of... What do you guys 
do? Do you just deploy manually (i.e. reproduce the settings from your 
sandboxes to development, then to staging then to production) or you 
found a way of having this automated?

Thank you so much :-)
unai

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:40:48 -0400, Kathleen Murtagh wrote:
> "Automating" deployment?  To what degree do you expect this to be automated?
> 
> I can't think of any situation in which you'd want deployment to be 
> done without observation and testing during the process.
> 
> Can you elaborate on what sort of process you are expecting?
> 
> --
> Kathleen Murtagh
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Unai Rodriguez <me at u-journal.org> wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> 
>> We are building a somewhat complex site based on Drupal which features
>> redundant servers at all levels of the system. We are starting of with 12
>> machines. We currently have three environments: development, staging and
>> production.
>> 
>> We are having a hard time setting an automated deployment mechanism.
>> 
>> I have searched on the archives but was able to find this thread only:
>> http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/support/2007-May/004711.html
>> 
>> I have not been able to understand from that how other people out there are
>> implementing automated deployment.
>> 
>> I found a number of links outside drupal.org:
>> 
>> 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/377629/drupal-deployment-testing-dont-how-to-call-it-tool
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/282858/drupal-source-control-strategy
>> 
http://nicksergeant.com/blog/drupal/painless-drupal-revision-control-cvs-and-subversion-shared-host
>> 
http://nicksergeant.com/blog/drupal/my-thoughts-small-scale-drupal-development-production-environments-cvs-and-subversion
>> http://www.workhabit.com/labs/autopilot
>> http://www.dave-cohen.com/node/1066
>> http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/drupal-dev-server
>> 
>> I have been working with Drupal's DEPLOY Module
>> (http://drupal.org/project/deploy). Also I am trying to contact Workhabit
>> (i.e. Autopilot guys).
>> 
>> I have not found yet a solid approach to automate deployment. Would anyone
>> through me some pointers on how to do it? How are you guys doing this?
>> 
>> Thank you so much,
>> unai
>> --
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> 
> 
> --
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