Deployer

I have been adding to my custom Deployer scripts for a number of months and I have now been using it to do more than just deploy my sites. Since it acts as a connection to my website server I have been using Deployer to perform other tasks like creating backups and clearing Drupal caches without having to log into the server to do it. What has helped me here is that I have set out my deployment tasks in a very modular fashion, so although my deployment runs a database backup, I there is nothing to stop me running the database backup command on it's own without doing a full deployment.

Deployer is a PHP based deployment tool that I have been using very successfully for a number of months now. It comes with a number of different recipes to deploy a variety of PHP based applications, including Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Drupal.

I first found Deployer when looking for a deployment package that suited my needs. Phing had been my tool of choice for a number of years, but it had proved problematic trying to debug the XML syntax when things needed tweaking. As I was deploying PHP applications it made sense to me to use a PHP based system to do the deployment. I looked at tools like Capistrano, but as I wasn't that familiar with Ruby I was worried that I wouldn't be able to debug mistakes or customise the deployment process easily.

Deployer is an amazing tool that is used to deploy websites (hence the name). I have looked at other tools, but because Deployer is built and run using PHP, using it to deploy PHP sites makes sense. It also means that I don't have to figure out complex XML documents or learn Ruby just to understand what the deployment is doing.

I have been using Deployer for a little while now to deploy my own site but I have been using the root user to accoumplish the deployments to get around any permissions issues. When I sat down with the developers at work we looked into how to setup the server so that deployments could be run without giving the tool unfettered access to the server. To this end we set out a plan to create a 'deployer' user on our servers that would be the user Deployer uses to deploy sites.

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