[lisper]

Yes, exactly. (And no worries about rookie questions. That's how people become non-rookies.)

In my case, I run the REPL using screen so I can go back to it for debugging if I need to. But you can also run "headless", without a REPL at all if you want.

[WalterGR]

How do you deal with existing connections to the Lisp service when you want to deploy?

e.g. remove from load balancer, wait up to n minutes for connections to drain?, git pull, quit, restart Lisp, re-add to load balancer. ?

[lisper]

Yep, pretty much. I've only ever dealt with low-load applications so there was no load balancer. You just put the Lisp server in a state where it refuses new connections (serves up a "temporarily down for mx" page, or reconfigure the ngingx front end to do that), wait for existing connections to finish, and then restart. It's no different from any other server.