Presentation: Deploying Websites with Rake

I just gave this presentation up at RIT this past week. Hopefully, it will inspire any web developers out there to look into using deployment frameworks (if you don’t already).

At Global Thinking we use Rake to make website deployment simple for our developers and painless for our clients. Yes, we use a Ruby build tool despite the fact that most of our development is on the LAMP stack!

Rake takes the complexity out of the deployment process by allowing our developers to script tasks that are frequently run, making them simple to execute over the lifespan of a project. It also adds an aspect of collaboration to our projects that is well-received by those less-familiar with complex tools like SSH and rsync (man rsync and you’ll know what I mean).

When I say this is simple for our clients, I mean this in the sense that it is totally transparent. The only requirement on their end is to provide SSH access to the production server. Even rsync is optional because we can work-around this by mounting the SSHFS locally.

If you want to learn more about how we implement this workflow, check out the presentation: Deploying Websites with Rake.