Automated Integration and Staging environments for LAMP-based application

Question

What would be a good tool-for-the-job to do automated deployments of LAMP-based applications(MySQL, PHP, Zend Framework) to integration and staging environments? I am looking specifically for tools that handle deployes to remote hosts. I assume building tools such as phing and ant I assume could be used for that, but I was wondering if there is something better for this case.

Answer 1

For integration, especially for continuous integration, I like phpUnderControl (which is a tool for PHP projects, but is itself based on CruiseControl, which is quite know in the JAVA World) : it deals with :

• fetching the last revision from SVN
• launching the automated tests (PHPUnit)
• php_CodeSniffer
• Generation of the PHP Documentation (phpDocumentor)
• and provides a nice interface for users to see the results of each build.

And, to begin, here's an article that explains how to set phpUnderControl up : Getting started with phpUnderControl
(Each time I, or some colleagues, have installed phpuc, we did almost as explained in that article, from what I remember)

For staging, I generally go with a couple of phing tasks to build a tar.gz archive, that I deploy to the staging server once in a while, using another phing task to un-tar the archive, and create the required symlinks (or stuff like that).

The idea being that Continuous Integration happens all the time, and has to be fully automatic, while deploying to staging is done only one in a while (once per week, for instance), and can be done semi-automatically.

Answer 2

Configure a build server, something like CruiseControl is excellent for this and roll your own custom Nant scripts if needed or use Exec tasks to take care of the deployment.

For these things like specific deployments each with their configuration issues and intricacies, there is hardly ever something out-of-the-box.

Look at it this way, rolling your own scripts and batch files definitely means you know all about the steps and can configure and modify it anyway you like, rather than some magic fairy dust going on, and when things break - having no idea where to fix it.