pushing code to windows servers in a scriptable way

Question

I'm looking for a good way to push code quickly and securely to my company's Windows web servers for release deployments.

I have a *nix background and in the past have always used rsync in conjunction with ssh for such tasks because it is quick, secure, and scriptable.

Right now our deployment process is very manual and requires logging into each server over remote desktop and using TortoiseHg to pull code from our main repo into the server (obviously this requires the webserver to have credentials into the central Hg repo). Needless to say, this process is very human, and accordingly error prone, not to mention tedious and slow. We also have several servers that we use internally for dev staging, QA team, etc.

What I would like to know is

1) Is there a straightforward way to do this either with rsync & ssh (and cygwin or powershell).

2) What is the most accepted way to script pushing code to Windows boxes??

Thanks, Jamie

Answer 1

Check out Jon Tørresdal's blog series on No-Click Web Deployment part 1 and part 2.