How to deploy web apps in the agile way [closed]

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What is the best set of practices and tools that could support me in the continuous deployment of an web application?

We s开发者_Python百科hould be able to deploy effortless several times a day.

It is a Ruby on Rails 3 app. We use Git and Github.

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What is the best set of practices

I am assuming you are trying to be agile here. You trying to derive a set of best practices for deployment is a little scary. For that matter, any sort of list of best practices for an Agile Team is scary. If you carefully study Agile, you will realize that it requires the Team to inspect and adapt and continuously improve, the moment you think that your Team has found the "best practices", you by default agree that you can stop improving and hence stop inspecting, adapting, and improving. Mike Cohn, author Agile Estimating and Planning, suggests that an agile team should not come up with a set of Best practices, instead it should continuously improve, by inspecting and adapting.

To give you some constructive feedback, here are some of the practices our Scrum Team followed, which we ourselves figured out by inspecting and adapting our own deployment process. I will add information about our source code checking in practices along with deployment as well.

• Every time a developer checked in code, Hudson-ci used scm poll trigger and automatically built and deployed code to a development enviroment. It sent appropriate notifications of success or failure via email.

• There was a nightly build in the development environment which was triggered by Hudson-ci automatically every night.

• After the features were ready and preliminarily tested in Dev environment, the QA on the team triggered a Hudson-ci build and deploy to the integration server, where the features could be integration tested. The Integration environment was an exact replica of the Production environment.
• Production deployment were usually done using Hudson again based on the release plan.

and tools that could support me in the continuous deployment of an web application?

There are several CI tools out there. My favorite out of the lot is Hudson-ci. Others are Continuum and Cruise control. But I think Hudson is the most versatile and easy to use tool, and because it has community driven plugins it will be very easy for you to find a plugin for git, and ruby on rails apps to fit in.

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IMVU is the poster child for continuous deployment and they got their by following the rule of "if we are sure we didn't break anything we need to deploy immediately." They now have very impressive automation around their process, but it started with that rule.

I think some of the ingredients that help with continuous deployment include:

1. always have a working build. this means continuous integration running automated unit tests on commit, and responding immediately to any failures. at IMVU they go as far as automatically reverting commits that break the build
2. extensive functional tests. this is what gives you confidence that you haven't broken anything. these tests tend to be slow so you'll need a strategy to keep the test time down, such as running tests in parallel across many machines or using a service like SauceLabs.
3. automated deployments. never deploy manually. never change configuration manually. deploy to all environments using the same technology.

When you say continuous deployment most people think of going automatically out to production without human intervention. You can stop short of that -- push-button production deployments -- and still get a lot of value. We (urbancode, makers of AnthillPro) help a lot of customers put these kinds of elements in place. Few people do the automatic production deploy, but automated deployment is helpful for everyone.

Jtf