[Chicago] deployment tools

[Garrett Smith]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Milan Andric<mandric at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Folks,
>
> I'm working on some infrastructure and was wondering what tools people
> are using to do stuff like:
>
> 1) generate some sql and run it on a few machines/databases
> 2) generate some apache conf and install it on some machines
> 3) checkout some code from svn onto a server
>
> I'm trying to automate this a little bit and before I go too far with
> my shell scripting I thought I'd ask around.  Each time there is a new
> project there is about 15 monotonous steps that need to be done that
> are nearly identical and error prone.

It's not the sexiest approach, but executing shell script commands
over ssh is pretty straight forward.

One of the problems with the remote management infrastructure
frameworks is that they generally have non-trivial adoption curves and
become Yet Another Thing to Maintain. If you just need to script some
tasks, ssh will work perfectly well and has the upside of being very
transparent.

If you think your remote management scheme will grow over time (e.g.
you want to keep a bunch of machines in line with some standard, etc.)
bcfg2 sounds like it'd be an option.

http://www.capify.org/index.php/Capistrano should also be on your radar.