Deploying perl code

[James Laver]

On 24 Jul 2014, at 17:25, David Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk> wrote:

> I'm looking for tools that will make it easy to go from a bunch of code
> in a release branch on github to an updated bunch of servers, with
> minimal downtime. If it matters we're using Debian.
> 
> Is this the sort of thing that puppet and chef are for? If you've used
> them are they as awesome as the hype makes out, or will they just push
> me into the same murderous rage as our current bunch of incomplete shell
> scripts do?

Puppet/chef isn’t going to work terribly well for this model, imo. I suspect what you’re looking for is capistrano ( or Tak, the perl equivalent (and mst-ware!) ). Puppet is *shitty* if you’re wanting to deal with anything to do with versioning - it makes you go set up a repository server where you pin the versions by hand.

I’m always going to recommend you build an app-specific perl and deploy that via rpm/deb, but whether you should build an os package of your code, well, depends on your code. I’m thinking from the sound of this, capistrano would be a better fit.

And if your jenkins isn’t already singing the single-button deployment song, make it do so*.

James

* My company provides consultancy on such matters, if such a thing would interest you and your budget has increased since the last time we spoke about it ;)