"yoda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I realize I'm losing so much time I could spend more productively. I'd > therefore like to know the different approaches you guys employ to > deploy builds from your staging servers (or laptops:) to the production > server in an automated repeatable safe manner.
This is really a wide-ranging question and clpy maybe is not the best place for it. Basically every installation does it differently depending on its requirements. You could google some phrases like "continuous integration" and "configuration management" to see some approaches. The general outline is: 1) QA dept. has a server configured as identically as possible to the production server. 2) Engineering releases a sw version by making a source control branch. QA checks out the branch and tests it against pre-agreed release criteria. If there's differences of opinion about criteria, QA manager and engineering manager meet to resolve differences. 3) when QA manager and engineering manager agree to release, code is pushed out to production server (same process as release to QA: someone logs onto the production server and does an svn update or whatever). How that's done depends on how the server works. I worked at one serious web site which worked as follows. We had a primary server and hot backup (secondary) server, so we did pushes by taking the backup server offline, checking out the new build on the backup server and running some sanity tests, then launching the service on the backup server and taking down the primary, so there would be an automatic failover to the backup which was now running the new code. We'd then upgrade the primary the same way, and fail over again if desired. Smaller sites with no hot secondary will typically go briefly offline for version upgrade. Larger sites with multiple primaries could have a more gradual process where primaries are upgraded one by one, or whatever. 4) Some high availability services (e.g. telecom) need hot upgrade (code replacement without stopping the application or interrupting connections). This needs to be built into the app architecture at a deep level and I don't think it's what you were asking, but some languages like Erlang make provisions for it. Generally, a release cycle for an online service isn't that much different than that for a shrink-wrapped software package. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
