My goal with this blog is to help other folks find the tools and tricks that help me so much. Here's one that I'd like to plug. It's a project I found on RIAForge called Deployment Builder. It was made by the hands of developers (Rob Brooks-Bilson and Adam Crump are involved) doing exactly what my team and I are trying to do, which is ease the deployment process for projects from the source code repository to any environment, whether it's staging or production.
There are two things that might make you hesistate, if my guess is right. The first is, "that's a lot of power to put into a tool/application." You're right for thinking that. The fine folks who built this tool have jumped through some sophisticated hoops to make it very well secured IMHO. I endorse their efforts and applaud the result. Being that it's installed, not hosted out there somewhere, I feel very comfortable with the product in this regard.
The second question I'm guessing you'll ask is something like, "My infrastructure is complicated - it would be a nightmare to configure this into an application!" Yes, you might be correct here. I found, however, that this application will take you at least 60% there, depending of course on where "there" is. For me, "there" was telling Deployment Builder the tag in SVN I want to deploy, the server (configured as a name and FTP host) I want to send it to, and then click "GO".
Nothing will replace the human factor here, but I see a dramatic speed increase coming now for the team and an increased "nimbleness" entering play that will allow us to juggle entire versions of products we're staging, testing, and pushing to live. No, I still don't have my one button trigger to get that OneHugeApp(TM) onto the load-balanced ColdFusion pool, but I can in just a few clicks anyway. It's a start.
And it's open source, which means perhaps we can contribute to it to help get it where it needs to be to make those kinds of things happen in one click. My motto lately has been the constant mantra, "there is no original problem." Finding this tool was a reassurance of that mantra.
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