Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#31

Post by bendavis381 »

andyhmltn wrote: post #16

Depends on whether or not I'm actively working on a new part of the site. It varies from 10+ times to 1-2 times an hour. However, with all these people talking about deployment, I just wanna hijack (sorry!) and ask if anybody can help with my current deployment setup: - Branch into a new feature (refactor-javascript for example) - Commit constantly - Rebase with master then merge into master - Push to remote repo - S…

Have a look at Fabric (http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.6/)

I wrote a quick fabfile yesterday that automatically commits/merges my local changes, pushes to a private GitHub repo, then SSHs into my production server, pulls down the latest code and restarts the web server. Gives me feedback along the way too.

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#33

Post by pcowans »

bobsy wrote: post #5

With my employer we deploy several times a day. We have 2 SVN repos. One dev, one live. To make a change live you commit your change to the live repo and it is auto-synced. I am not sure how we came to have this. When I first joined there was a code reviewer who manually pushed changes live. He quit and the server admin made it auto. I wouldn't recommend this set up. I am incredibly competent. I make maybe 1 minor mi…

So, obvious question... why do you not have tests in this set up?

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#34

Post by tudorconstantin »

aidos wrote: post #27

Sometimes I like to edit things direct on the live server, then again, I'm not running a public facing website, so I'm allowed :) I'd wager many people here missed "the good old days" when it wasn't uncommon to debug a live website over ftp.

We still debug and fix on production servers from time to time (once every few months), although we have intermediary staging environments and a full release procedure.

But, when sh*t hits the fan, the business enter in the "ain't nobody got time for that" mode and they urge for the fix.

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#37

Post by pcowans »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #34
aidos wrote: post #27

Sometimes I like to edit things direct on the live server, then again, I'm not running a public facing website, so I'm allowed :) I'd wager many people here missed "the good old days" when it wasn't uncommon to debug a live website over ftp.

We still debug and fix on production servers from time to time (once every few months), although we have intermediary staging environments and a full release procedure. But, when sh*t hits the fan, the business enter in the "ain't nobody got time for that" mode and they urge for the fix.

That should never be necessary; if you invest in the appropriate automation you can get your regular deployment process down to a few minutes and then even emergency fixes can go through the normal channels. The benefit is of course mainly the ease of day to day deployment, but it does mean that in those emergency cases you don't need to worry about what you've forgotten to do, or how your changes might mess up the assumptions baked into the automated system.

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#38

Post by wrath »

bobsy wrote: post #5

With my employer we deploy several times a day. We have 2 SVN repos. One dev, one live. To make a change live you commit your change to the live repo and it is auto-synced. I am not sure how we came to have this. When I first joined there was a code reviewer who manually pushed changes live. He quit and the server admin made it auto. I wouldn't recommend this set up. I am incredibly competent. I make maybe 1 minor mi…

At my company I tend to think that we hire very competent developers. Our code base is so complicated (because of legacy code and/or the complexity of the tasks) that developers make mistakes all the time. They are caught by both a peer code-review process and the QA team or support/customers. I trust that you are "incredibly competent" but 1 mistake a month seems very low to me. But what do I know! :)

What type of product do you have? Do you have a QA team? Do you track new and close bug counts from week to week? Similarly do you track regression counts from build to build? Does the code base have a high completeness rate for unit tests? Do you only deploy if you pass the unit tests? What if you introduce a bug that screws up the data, do you have a fallback strategy?

I'm curious because I always had a dream to be able to deploy on a daily basis but I've never gotten there "yet". It's always nice to hear what others are doing for daily deployments.

Re: Poll: How often do you deploy to production?

#40

Post by pcowans »

andyhmltn wrote: post #16

Depends on whether or not I'm actively working on a new part of the site. It varies from 10+ times to 1-2 times an hour. However, with all these people talking about deployment, I just wanna hijack (sorry!) and ask if anybody can help with my current deployment setup: - Branch into a new feature (refactor-javascript for example) - Commit constantly - Rebase with master then merge into master - Push to remote repo - S…

This doesn't seem that bad to me, what problems is it causing?

The only changes I'd make would be to wrap it up in a script so you have one-click deploys, and possibly implement the 'copy and symlink' strategy that Capistrano uses so you have minimal downtime during deploys and instant roll-backs if necessary.

Post reply on HN