A “deployment” is the process of moving new code into your production environment. Whether this code is a new feature, a bug fix, or any other new modification you would like to make to your live site. Deployments can be stressful events that make the idea of executing a deployment appear to be a big red button. This makes us want to deploy code as little as possible.

This does not have to be the case.

At Crowd Favorite, everyone deploys. It doesn’t matter if you are a Project Manager, Front-end Developer, or have any other primary responsibility. We have developed the process and tools to make deployment accessible and painless. Using automation, we utilize single step deployments and have made failure cheap with single step rollbacks. This process allows our relatively large team deploy code rapidly and with confidence.

In this presentation I will walk through common deployment stresses associated with using FTP as your primary deployment tool. Then I will contrast this with the open source tooling we use to automate these processes. Wrapping it up with a live demo of how to convert an existing site to use this deployment process.

You would be well served to brush up on the following topics prior to the presentation:

– Using SSH
– Version Control (Git, Subversion, etc..)
– Command Line Usage in General

The primary tool we will be discussing is Capistrano-WP, an open source Capistrano plugin meant to help deploy WordPress specifically.