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Poll: How are your Web apps deployed?

July 19, 2011, 7:17 AM PDT

Takeaway: Do you deploy your Web apps by hand or via automated tools or hand-built scripts/tools? Or, does an app server handle the deployment? Let us know by taking this poll.

Web apps are nice for users since they don’t have to deal with deployment pains, but the developers still have to worry about it. Most developers I know are still manually deploying apps to servers by hand. Others are using the built-in deployment tools in Visual Studio 2010 or third-party deployment tools. Some folks write their own deployment systems. And other developers have application servers with built-in deployment capabilities.

How are your Web apps deployed?

J.Ja

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About Justin James

Justin James is the Lead Architect for Conigent.

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2 Votes

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Contributr

I can think of a few reasons

Justin James 20th Jul 2011

* When your data is in an SCM controlled repository, it tends to be read only until it gets checked out, which could interfere with many apps.

* SCM's tend to litter the file system with special files.

* You may not want to sync everything (like a web.config file) which *would* be in a repository for dev, but replacing it on Live would be a problem, and trying to manually remember that each deployment is a headache.

* There may be post-deployment tasks that you need to do.

None of these are insurmountable issues. I know that some people *do* use SCM for deployments, but it does not seem to be a widespread thing, at least not in the circles that I run in.

J.Ja

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2 Votes

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Nothing wrong with FTP

Spitfire_Sysop 19th Jul 2011

I have an idea for your OSS solution: Make an add-on for FileZilla! It's a great, free, cross-platform FTP client. All you really need for deployment. The only thing it is missing is some awareness of contents. Change management. It needs a log with date/time transactions so you can see when you last published what. It also needs some way of comparing the contents of two sets of data and giving you a synopsis of differences. Like "These 4 files have changed more recently than the published version, this file is missing, etc..."

Seems like a simple solution to me.
http://filezilla-project.org/

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2 Votes

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Contributr

Yes, there's something wrong with FTP

Sterling "chip" Camden 19th Jul 2011

It's called clear text authentication. Use SSH instead.

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0 Votes

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These aren't big jumps for feature adds.

mattohare@... 21st Jul 2011

I'd not be surprised to see these version control platforms add a web app rollout mechanism. They need only add a few things for developers to highlight some minor changes.

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1 Vote

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I use SCM for deployments

mikerosile 21st Jul 2011

My last two jobs, and current job included, I've used SCM tools for deployment. My last two jobs we used Subversion, which has an "export" option that eliminates the concerns of files required to be checked out and littering the file system as .svn folders are not exported. From the SVN manual, "svn export -- Export a clean directory tree"

In my current job, I do a lot of web development and use git for my SCM. Git only uses one .git folder at the root directory of a project. Git also has an export option and an ignore option so you're not exporting unnecessary files such as "web.config".

AS for post-deployment tasks, I tend to write scripts (batch, powershell, python, etc.) to facilitate the deployment (exporting from SCM) and run any post-deployment tasks.

I think using SCM for deployments makes a lot of sense, and honestly I'm surprised more people don't take advantage of it.

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2 Votes

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Contributr

I can think of a few reasons

Justin James 20th Jul 2011

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