PHP Build system

Question

I'm using PHPUnderControl which runs on top of Cruise Control for my continuous integration and unit testing. I also have it setup to run PHPDocumentor to generate phpdoc's for me and it runs PHP Code Sniffer to enforce coding standards for me. But now I want to set up something on that same server (Ubuntu) to make deploying to a remote server easier. I already have it setup so after every successful build an SVN Export is done from trunk into a directory within the projects folder on the server.

I've been thinking of writing a little custom PHP script that will SSH to a configured remote server, tarball up the latest export, copy it over, untar and run any migrations. A PHP script like this shouldn't be too hard initially, unless I need to eventually begin scaling to multiple servers. I know there are systems out there like Phing, Fabric and others.

My question is if anyone has any experience with these and can provide some pro's and con's? I've begun setting up Phing on my server and will be trying Fabric next to play with them, but was wondering if anyone who has used them more extensively, or had to scale them, could provide some feedback.

Answer 1

If I was to implement such a deployment system, I would probably opt for a slightly different solution from what you've outlined above. Instead of having code that runs locally on my system, connects to a list of remote servers and does the "work" there, I would pack the updater module with the rest of the code and have it pull the update data from my server on demand (or rather when I "told" it to do so). That way you have much less to worry about on your end (you just need to serve the updated code via http when requested, and the remote server handles the rest). Just my 2 cents.

Answer 2

I've used Capistrano with PHP (even though it's more of a Rails-y thing as it's written in Ruby).

It's been really straightforward to use, but that said I haven't had to scale much with it. We do deploy to various different staging/production servers though, and the multi-stage extension has been useful in those scenarios.

However like most things Ruby, there's a lot of hooks and "magic" which can get confusing if you're new to Capistrano and trying to do something tricky with it.

As for how it compares to other deployment tools, I can't comment. I know we used to use Phing, but I'm uncertain why we switched to Capistrano.

Answer 3

We use phing and it has come in handy. We don't use it for packaging, but it shouldn't be too hard to make it do what you are looking for. We mainly use it for common tasks such as clearing caches, building development sites, and other tasks to aide in development. Its been a big help, and from what I can gather it seems to be an ant clone, although it might not have all the functionality that ant has.

Answer 4

I've written my own rsync like tool for this because i work from a very bad internet connection in a 3rd world contry and have all kinds of failures and starving connections so that rsync does not work.

On your remote system you should at least write a litte script that is doing backups before running migrations.

Better is you are using a total independent mirror system on your web host system and include some small but fundamental unit tests after a migration. Then do a root switching to put the updated website online. This would require to run a few interactive services in read-only mode during migration (unfortunately a feature that not many people implement).

But first of all - think if it is really worth your time doing this - if you only update each a quarter then a simple checklist on paper would be enough.

Answer 5

If you like Capistrano, but wished it was a bit more PHP'ish, check out Fredistrano.

I wrote an automated build (SVN export, Zend Guard encoding, etc) and deployment system using Phing once and found quite the pain to use. Whenever I had to write a special task I felt I had to jump through way to many hoops just to get it to work.

So, these days I just write simple bash scripts that does building with SVN checkout, encoding, creating a tag in SVN and deployment through rsync. It may be low-tech, and Phing may have some superior features, but atleast it doesn't get in my way.