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by notatallshaw 177 days ago
> At one company I worked at, we had a system where each deploy got its own folder, and we'd update a symlink to point to the active one. It worked, but it was all manual, all custom, and all fragile.

The first time I saw this I thought it was one of the most elegant solutions I'd ever seen working in technology. Safe to deploy the files, atomic switch over per machine, and trivial to rollback.

It may have been manual, but I'd worked with a deployment processes that involved manually copying files to dozens of boxes and following 10 to 20 step process of manual commands on each box. Even when I first got to use automated deployment tooling in the company I worked at it was fragile, opaque and a configuration nightmare, built primarily for OS installation of new servers and being forced to work with applications.
3 comments
toast0 177 days ago
> It may have been manual

It's pretty easy to automate a system that pushes directories and changes symlinks. I've used and built automation around the basic pattern.

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shimms 177 days ago
It’s been a while (a decade?!) but if I recall correctly Capistrano did this for rails deployments too, didn’t it?
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thunderbong 177 days ago
Not just rails. Capistrano is tech stack agnostic. It's possible to deploy a project with nodejs using Capistrano.

And yes, it's truly elegant.

Rollbacks become trivial should you need it.

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AznHisoka 177 days ago
I am now feeling old for using Capistrano even today. I think there might be “cooler and newer” ways to deploy, but i never ever felt the need to learn what those ways are since Capistrano gets the job done.
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copperx 177 days ago
I remember using mina and it was much faster than Capistrano. Sadly, it seems it's now unmaintained.
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hdjrudni 176 days ago
I did this, but I used rsync, and you can tell rsync to use the previous ver as the basis so it wouldn't even need to upload everything all over again. Super duper quick to deploy.

I put that in a little bash script so.. I don't know if you call anything that isn't CI "manual" but I don't think it'd be hard to work into some pipeline either.

I kind of miss it honestly.

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