Deploying website as part of continuous integration build.

Question

I am getting started with doing continuous integration builds of our web site. I currently have the CI server publishing the site to a folder. The next step is to deploy the files to our site.

The site set up on our continuous integration server so we can see the results of our build. The site is set up as a virtual directory under the default web site in IIS. I am struggling with how to deploy the build files to site. If I copy/xcopy/robocopy the files files to the virtual directory's physical directory should I stop and start the web publishing service on the server as part of script? Should I recycle the application pool?

What about later moving the build to a QA server or production server? What tool would you use for this?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

If it is an ASP.NET application, xcopying will modify web.config which will unload the application domain so you don't need to stop and start the web publishing service nor recycle the application pool.

Answer 2

Take a look at Capistrano, it is a Ruby tool designed specifically to deploy applications to server. It checks your code out of your SCM and deploys it to your server. You can set up multiple server environments and tell it which to deploy to. Once you have the basic deploy recipe working, it is easy to add new servers.

Check out the peepcode screencast to get an idea of how Capistrano works.

• http://www.capify.org/
• http://peepcode.com/products/capistrano-2