Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Manage Dev/Test/Production Environments?
An anonymous reader writes "I am a n00b system administrator for a small web development company that builds and hosts OSS CMSes on a few LAMP servers (mostly Drupal). I've written a few scripts that check out dev/test/production environments from our repository, so web developers can access the site they're working on from a URL (ex: site1.developer.example.com). Developers also get FTP access and MySQL access (through phpMyAdmin). Additional scripts check in files to the repository and move files/DBs through the different environments. I'm finding as our company grows (we currently host 50+ sites) it is cumbersome to manage all sites by hacking away at the command prompt. I would like to find a solution with a relatively easy-to-use user interface that provisions dev/test/live environments. The Aegir project is a close fit, but is only for Drupal sites and still under heavy development. Another option is to completely rewrite the scripts (or hire someone to do it for me), but I would much rather use something OSS so I can give back to the community. How have fellow slashdotters managed this process, what systems/scripts have you used, and what advice do you have?"
We utilize a number of tools depending on the site, but generally:
Version Control (Subversion) for management of the code base (PHP, CSS, HTML, Ruby, PERL,...) - http://subversion.tigris.org/
BCFG2 for management of the system(s) patches and configurations (Uses svn for managing the files) - http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2
Capistrano/Webistrano for deployment (Webistrano is a nice GUI to capistrano - http://www.capify.org/ / http://labs.peritor.com/webistrano
However, all of the tools above mean nothing without defining very good standards and practices for your organization. Only you and your organization can figure those out...