Deployment, let's put things on the internet

Since I've recently played arount with this a little more, let's talk about how to deploy a website.

FTP & SFTP - the classics

At least for me these two get the bonus of being what I've always used. Everyone who can handle a filemanager will most likely be able to handle any FTP client.

• Version control: You can get that, at least kinda. Just don't overwrite you files all the time, instead rename the old file with a version number, the date or whatever suits your needs. It may not be fany but here you go, it works.
• Available everywhere: you don't need any software that anyone might consider excotic and more or less ever webhosting company out there gives you (S)FTP.

While I still use this a lot has its issues: large numbers of (small) files take really long to upload and with the pseudo 'version control' I've outlined above you really have to be careful not to miss uploading a file after having renamed the original when you are updating something.

git for deployment

Something that has become popular in recent years is to deploy websites via git.

If you dont have the option to deploy to your host via git something like deploybot may be for you: they are serving as a bridge between git and different other methods of deployments and allow to run your buildscripts on their end. And that is something I want to play around with in the future and maybe move towards it a little more. However this depends on what kind of use I will eventually make of all the buildtools available there.

What this site uses: deployment with git on frotrabbit

This site is hosted on fortrabbit who provide me with a very nice way of git-based deployment, all I have to do is to push to a remote repository and they will run any buildscripts I define and then deploy to production. I have acutally never used their service before but have looked at it several times over the last year or so, looking for a project to try it out.

git push -u fr master

That is actually how easy it is to deplay a site in this way, after that you just watch the script running and everything is taken care of.