How I do deployments

I have and have had many sites that I run. They're all some form of side-project.

What they almost all have in common is two things

1. They have very little traffic (thus not particularly mission critical)
2. I run everything on one server (no need for "spinning up" new VMs here and there)

Many many years ago, when current interns I work with were mere babies, I started a very simple "procedure".

1. On the server, in the user directory where the site is deployed, I write a script called something like upgrade_myproject.sh which is executable and does what the name of the script is: it upgrades the site.

2. In the server's root home directory I write a script called restart_myproject.sh which also does exactly what the name of the script is: it restarts the service.

3. On my laptop, in my ~/bin directory I create a script called UpgradeMyproject.sh (*) which runs upgrade_myproject.sh on the server and runs restart_myproject.sh also on the server.

And here is, if I may say so, the cleverness of this; I use ssh to execute these scripts remotely by simply piping the commands to ssh. For example:

#!/bin/bash
echo "./upgrade_generousfriends.sh" | ssh -A django@ec2-54-235-210-62.compute-1.amazonaws.com
echo "./restart_generousfriends.sh" | ssh root@ec2-54-235-210-62.compute-1.amazonaws.com

That's an example I use for Wish List Granted.

This works so darn well, and has done for years, that this is why I've never really learned to use more advanced tools like Fabric, Salt, Puppet, Chef or <insert latest deployment tool name>.

This means that all I need to do run a deployment is just type UpgradeMyproject.sh[ENTER] and the simple little bash scripts takes care of everything else.

The reason I keep these on the server and not on my laptop is simply because that's where they naturally belong and if I'm ssh'ed in and mess around I don't have to exit out to re-run them.

Here's an example of the upgrade_generousfriends.sh I use for Wish List Granted:

#!/bin/bash
cd generousfriends
source venv/bin/activate
git pull origin master
find . | grep '\.pyc$' | xargs rm -f
pip install -r requirements/prod.txt
./manage.py syncdb --noinput
./manage.py migrate webapp.main
./manage.py collectstatic --noinput
./manage.py compress --force
echo "Restart must be done by root"

I hope that, by blogging about this, that someone else sees that it doesn't really have to be that complicated. It's not rocket science and most complex tools are only really needed when you have a significant bigger scale in terms of people- and skill-complexity.

In conclusion

Keep it simple.

(*) The reason for the capitalization of my scripts is also an old habit. I use that habit to differentiate my scripts for stuff I install from any third parties.