[deckar01]

You don't have to wait until you migrate to containerized deploys. Last year my team started deploying our project to folders named after the branch and setup one apache rule to redirect all *.dev. subdomains to the correct folder. We call them virtual development environments, and they worked really well with our existing QA process.

[hobarrera]

What about dependency changes (ie: a new package needs to be installed or updated), or database schema updates?

This also sounds very specific (probably using apache+cgi?). It won't really work for most techs out there.

[deckar01]

The deploy script updates dependencies.

We're not using the apache cgi plugin for python to resolve dependencies, just packages relative the the application root. I think most languages that can import dependencies can import relative dependencies.

Although my specific setup may not work for everyone, I suspect that there is an equally simple solution for most projects. Containerization is definitely a long-term goal, but it is not prerequisite for automated deploys. The things you have to change to get deploys to work on an existing server will also be useful for containerization.