project deployment automation with PVCS

Question

Hi all,

We use PVCS for source control for all our code. We have 7 Servers across the EU covering 17 countries. PVCS mimics our folder structure in production:

folderA
|
|--folderB
|     |
|     | -- folderC
|     |
|     | -- folder
| --folderD
|     |
|     | -- folderE
|     |
|     | -- folderF

Our projects can be dependant on files in multiple folders so we can just copy one folder out to deploy a new project. Also multiple programs can live in the same folder.

We have a DEV, UAT and Production server. Files will be developed on the DEV server, put onto UAT (well they are supposed to, this is part of the problem, too many human hands involved and some of them don't want to play ball), for testing by the user. When UAT is approved they are put back into PVCS with the appropriate version label and assigned a development level, (they can be put back into PVCS earlier with a development version label).

When all the relevant approvals have been done a change control request is raised and the support team will deploy the code to production.

Our biggest problem is the process is so bitty and there are too many people that have to do certain things at certain times and tell people stuff in the right order.

What we would like is a program that would automate the deployment of projects. You would need to be able to assign different files from different folders in PVCS a project label and then be able to progress that label and deploy all the files as needed.

Does this exist?

I hope that made sense.

Thanks

Jon

EDIT:

We would be creating new projects all the time. A project would relate to a deployment. I.e. project 1234 would have files 1,2,5,6 project 2345 would use files, 2,5,8. So to this end we would need a quick and easy way to add and manage projects.

If anyone can suggest a better way of dealing with this sort of automation that would be great as well.

We are not interested in compiling the code and testing as there are a number of languages and I believe that would be way out of our scope at this point.

Answer 1

Check out nAnt and Cruise Control

edit: With Cruise Control you can always write your own plug ins to better handle your environment.

Answer 2

PVCS can be automated. The Software Engineering people in my organization have created a whole set of scripts to go along with PVCS. We use these scripts to automate our SW integration and release process.

For example, we have a script to create a Release, which means creating a new project with specific versions of files coming from many projects and databases. Sounds similar to what you want to do.