Automating web site deployment at Barcamp Brighton

Sep 6, 2009 · 1 minute read

On the first day at Barcamp Brighton this year I did a brief talk about getting started with automating deployment. I kept it nice and simple and didn’t focus on any specific technology or tool - just the general principles and pitfalls of doing anything manually. You can see the “slides on Slideshare”:

As part of the presentation I even did a live demo and promised I’d upload the code I used. The following is an incredibly simple fabric file that has most the basic set of tasks. Fabric is a python tool similar to capistrano in Ruby. I don’t really care whether you’re using make, ant, rake, capistrano or just plain shell scripts. Getting from not automating things to automating deployments is the important part - and it’s easier that you think.

The other part of the code example was a very basic apache virtualhost so just in case anyone needed that as well here it is:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName sample.local
    DocumentRoot /srv/sample/releases/current
    <Directory /srv/sample/releases/current>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/sample/error.log
    LogLevel warn
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/sample/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>