Ask HN: How do you deploy a simple web project?

If you're living inside the PHP world, I'd take a look at Phing ( <a href="http://www.phing.info/trac/" rel="nofollow">http://www.phing.info/trac/</a> ). It's very similar to Apache Ant and uses a XML file to describe the build tasks (include/exclude files, copy, tar, SCP, run PHPUnit tests, etc.) and can easily be extended using PHP (we use the rsync extension). It takes a little while to get everything up and running, but once you've got it (and well tests) it'd pretty much bulletproof.<p>Also worth taking a look at WePay's blog post on how they do deployments: <a href="http://blog.wepay.com/2010/11/30/weploy-wepays-deployment-tool/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.wepay.com/2010/11/30/weploy-wepays-deployment-to...</a>

I deploy a simple project of mine using a horrible PHP script I wrote: <a href="https://github.etsycorp.com/gist/391780" rel="nofollow">https://github.etsycorp.com/gist/391780</a><p>My site is just static files, but it wouldn't actually be that much more complicated if it wasn't. The only thing I'd really need to add would be a line that runs database migrations. You can google "PHP database migrations" to find a handful of libraries that do this, or honestly just make a dummy rails project, and use theirs: <a href="http://guides.rubyonrails.org/migrations.html" rel="nofollow">http://guides.rubyonrails.org/migrations.html</a>.<p>Note that the script I wrote is for a site of mine that gets literally zero traffic (although I'm hoping to get more to it eventually.) If it was something more important, I would probably start moving in the direction of Chef or Capistrano, which are more structured, and have things like error-handling.<p>Regarding stuff you don't want pushed to the site, it sounds like you need to fix your directory structure. It should be something like this:<p><pre><code> project/ ..app/ ....controller.php ....database.php [etc] ..public/ ....index.php ....images/ ......some_img.jpeg ....css/ ......styles.css </code></pre> and then the only directory that should be accessible from the internets is project/public. You deploy the project dir, and serve the site from project/public (so if I go to project.com/index.php, that corresponds to project/public/index.php on the file system.)<p>If you have multiple apps in one repo, you would just have them under project1, project2, then follow the same structure. If you have stuff that doesn't get deployed, it could sit alongside project in a different directory that you don't deploy.<p>For your requires and so on, you should be using relative paths, so that shouldn't be a problem. If you're not using relative paths, you're crazy and you should fix that. (First the being crazy part, then the relative paths part. You should also use an autoloader, so that you're not really manually requiring stuff that much.

My tip for using Jenkins (or CI in general): have your build script produce a single-file artifact. You don't have a .war file, but what you can do is simply tar or zip your project. I recommend having a source directory and a build directory, and writing your build script such that the source directory is untouched and the output files are placed in the build directory. At the end, zip up that build directory and call it your artifact. You don't HAVE to do this but that's my piece of advice.. it will make your life easier.<p>Once you've got a stable artifact-builder, you can write a nice script that takes that file and deploys it to the location of your choice.<p>As you point out, some work needs to be done to determine which files are copied in the build process. I'm not familiar with PHP, but I am involved in an HTML application that has a similar need. We're using RequireJS &#60;<a href="http://requirejs.org/docs/optimization.html#wholeproject&#62;" rel="nofollow">http://requirejs.org/docs/optimization.html#wholeproject&#62...</a>, which has the ability to do all of the copying and optimization in one step. In our build.js file, we specify some patterns to control which files are included and excluded.

Have you considered using fabric[1]? It's awesome!<p>[1] <a href="http://fabfile.org" rel="nofollow">http://fabfile.org</a>

Do you know of ServerFault? The reason you shouldn't ask this on StackOverflow is that it is on-topic on sister-site ServerFault. Either you'll find a similar question, or you'll have the opportunity to ask yours.

A simple web project? svn export, mysqldump, kick apache