Chapter 22. Deployment techniques
This chapter covers
On launch night, tensions are high because the smallest mistake could bring your website down. To eliminate the human mistakes that inevitably occur, we like to automate as much as possible. Ideally, we could simply push a button, and our website would be updated in moments.
Each deployment environment is slightly different, because connection strings, configuration settings, and server environments can vary. By introducing change management into our automated deployment process, we can ensure that we install the correct application with the correct environment settings.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to simplify deployment through an XCOPY deployment strategy. You’ll also learn how to automate deployment with build automation tools and take advantage of configuration management to automate configuration changes to the various deployment environments. After utilizing these techniques on a local machine, the next logical step is to add remote deployment capabilities. We’ll look at using the Web Deploy tool to take an existing local deployment and give it remote server capabilities. Once you can automate the deployment to remote servers, your development team will have the ability to create new environments and test systems with ease.