deploying custom software on linux?

Question

I write company internal software in PHP and C++.

What are the best methods of deploying this type of software to linux machine? Currently, we use svn export, are there any other methods?

Answer 1

We use checkinstall. Just write a simple Makefile that copies the files to target directories on the target machine and then run checkinstall to create RPM, DEB or TGZ package, which you can later easily install with distribution package management tools.

You can even add shell scripts that are executed before and after files are copied, so you can do some pre and post processing like adding user accounts, crontab entries, etc.

Once you get more advanced, you can add dependencies to these packages so it could also pull and install PHP, MySQL, Apache, GCC libraries and even required PHP or Apache modules or some extenal C++ libs you might need, all with a single command.

Answer 2

There is, in my experience, a tradeoff between security and ease of deployment.

For my deployment, I've never had a problem using scp to move the files from one machine to another. You can write a simple BASH script to take a list of machines (from a text file or STDIN) and push a given directory/application to a given directory on all of the machines. Say you hypothetically did it to a bin directory, the end user would never know the difference.

The only problem with that would be when you have multiple architectures and OSes, where it has to be compiled on each one individually. In that case, you could just write a script (the first example that pops into my mind is Net::SSH from Ruby) to take that list of servers, cd to the given directory, and run the compilation script. However, if all machines use the same architecture and configuration, you can hypothetically just compile it once on the machine that you are using to distribute.

Answer 3

I think it depends on what you mean by deploy. Typically a deploy process for web projects involves a configuration scripting step in which you can take the same deploy package and cater it to specific servers (staging, development, production) by altering simple configuration directives.

In my experience with Linux serviers, these systems are often custom built, and in my experience often use rsync rather than svn export and/or scp alone.

A script might be executed from the command line like so:

$ deploy-site --package=app \
--platform=dev \
--title="Revsion 1.2"

Internally, the system would take whatever was in trunk for the given package from SVN (I'm sure you could adapt this really easily for git too), generate a new unique tag with the log entry "deploying Revision 1.2".

Then it would patch any configuration scripts with the appropriate changes (urls, hosts, database passwords, etc.) before rsyncing it the appropriate destination.

If there are issues with the deployment, it's as easy as running the same command again only this time using one of your auto-generated tags from an earlier deploy:

$ deploy-site --package=app \
--platform=dev \
--title="Reverting to Revision 1.1" \
--tag=20090714200154

If you have to also do a compile on the other end, you could include as part of your configuration patching a Makefile and then execute a command via ssh that would compile the recently deployed code once the rsync process completes.