Tower Of Power

(Originally posted on my company's blog)

I've been talking a lot about automation as of late and posted a generic, overload broad view of the tools and utilities I use here at Net Perspective. However, I wanted to go into detail about my real world uses of a particular tool, Phing.

In my time with Net Perspective (and our previous existence), I've completely dreaded live deployment days, and yes they were full days. An entire day dedicated to waiting for FTP to finish uploads, chmod'ing directories (because Plesk hates me), setting up databases, and testing. All of this despite the fact that we did periodic staging deployments on the same server!

I guess a lot of thanks goes out to Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing, and More by Kevin McArthur. While I found this book to feel more like a Zend Framework tutorial, it did provide a brief introduction to 2 utilities I use here at work, only one of which we care about at the moment: Phing.

Phing is a build environment based on Ant (familiar to those in Java world). For those not familiar, Phing uses XML based build files with tags representing tasks and task groupings. At Net Perspective, I use Phing build scripts for everything from packaging up tarballs of utilities we've published (simple jQuery plug-ins, etc.) to automating the live deployment of client sites. The latter I'm particularly happy with as my deployment time has been reduced from a few hours between 10 minutes max (for a brand new, fresh upload) and about 30 seconds (for an update).

Basic Phing usage is pretty self explanatory, however you may wish to search Google for Phing tutorials, or read my post I linked above.

Further more, my build scripts make use of custom command executions requiring both the execution environment to be *NIX based and for you to read this article on using rsync over ssh without a password (using pre-shared keys).

Read the rest of my post here...