Deployment woes: What do I do after "svn up"?

Question

I've got several questions. I have no idea how the heck to deploy...

After doing "svn up" on my production server, I'm not sure how to "refresh" my server so that the changes are reflected when you visit it. What can I do to refresh my server to see the changes in production? (I tried rebooting.)

I also noticed that some of the files that I changed weren't truly updated. I deleted a file and saw that doing "svn up" would bring the file back. I went back and deleted everything in the web app's folders, including the svn files (probably a mistake). (I should be safe since I have the prod revisions on the test server, I assume...) So, how can I bring these files back?

I need all the advice and resources on this that I can get. Feel free to post anything else that will get me through this process.

Answer 1

Perhaps these will shed some light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation

Answer 2

It depends how you run your django up. If you're serving with mod_python/modwsgi, a simple apache restart does the trick.

If you're datamodel changed, you may need to call south command migrate.

On most Linux-Systems this can be done with service apache2 restart

You can do the svn up, manage.py migrate and service apache2 restart with fabric

Fabric helps you to automate to execute shell commands over ssh.

Answer 3

If you are deploying on mod_wsgi you can simply touch the .wsgi file and it will reload the app without having to restart your whole server/httpd/etc