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Comment by lamby | Hacker News Reader

Wait, how do you deploy with with scp? What happens when you drop a file locally?

He's saying that all you have to do is post the file on a webserver with PHP installed and it should work. No compiling. No raking. No installing Passenger, Rack, etc...

I'm a Ruby guy, but I do recognize that PHP deployment is generally fast, smooth and easy.

I understand the above, I was asking something else.

Your app machine pulls the new version from the source machine via scp, then changes a symlink. like a poor man's rsync --backup

That exact same workflow exists for Passenger. I'm not even sure you can install Rails without Rack anymore. And installing and deploying a fresh Passenger install is easier than deploying a second app on a Mongrel/Apache cluster; it is very, very easy.

I know the first time that I tried to set up Passenger with Sinatra- I had some issues, despite following tutorials. I kept having to touch some file to get it to read the new files and wasn't really working as expected. PHP just seems to run after I apt-get the php stuff and drop the files in there.

But yes, generally Passenger does the trick.

I've consistently had problems deploying Rails apps. I can usually work through them, but it has never once been smooth.

It must be me, though, because every time I mention it, someone accuses me of being an idiot or trolling.

It used to be way complicated, but Passenger has made everything orders of magnitude easier. Tried it?

I'm not sure what you mean by "drop" a file.

Small websites with low cohesion between pages can probably get away with scp or rsync and nothing else. For a more highly trafficked website, you'll hide server instances from the outside world as you update their files and configuration. But this still isn't rocket science.

What I think they mean is that if you remove a file locally, it is still probably accessible on the production machine if you just use scp to copy the files over directly. Rsync is a better option for this if you want to ensure locally removed files are in fact removed on your production machine(s).

I haven't done PHP work for almost 5-6 years, but when we did it, I had post-commit scripts set up in SVN (or was it CVS back then?) that if a commit was tagged "production" would trigger the production server to perform a fresh checkout. That was the only deploy step needed.

Funny, but you can get the same type of setup working with any language. Scp a WAR file into the appropriate Tomcat directory and your Java project is good to go (no reloading of the appserver required). Or, if you have auto-reloading of modules setup in Python, you can do the same thing.

So, this type of deployment isn't just for PHP... but with PHP it is the default (only?) method.

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