Automate Deployment for Web Applications? [closed]

Thank you all for your kind suggestions. We checked them all out, but after careful consideration we decided to roll our own with a combination of CruiseControl, NAnt, MSBuild and MSDeploy.

This article has some great information:Integrating MSBuild with CruiseControl.NET

Here's roughly how our solution works:

• Developers build the 'debug' version of the app and run unit tests, then check in to SVN.
• CruiseControl sees the updates and calls our build script...
  • Runs any new migrations on the build database
  • Replaces the config files with the build server config
  • Builds the 'debug' configuration of the app
  • Runs all unit and integration tests
  • Builds the 'deploy' configuration of the app
    • Versions the DLLs with the current major/minor version and SVN revision, e.g. 1.2.0.423
    • Moves this new build to a 'release' folder on our build server
    • Removes unneeded files
  • Updates IIS on the build server if required

Then when we have verified everything is ready to go up to live/staging we run another script to:

• Run migrations on live/staging server
• MSDeploy: archive current live/staging site
• MSDeploy: sync site from build to live/staging

It wasn't pretty getting to this stage, but it's mostly working like a charm now :D

I'm going to try and keep this answer updated as we make changes to our process, as there seem to be several similar questions on SA now.

I have used Visual Build Pro for years, It's quite slick and easy to use and has many standard operations (like the ones you mentioned) built in.

I use Puppet, Makefiles to build RPMs and Bamboo to do this for me. My system doesn't directly apply, and I'm not to familiar with the Windows world, but there are some transferable patterns.

My make setup allows me to build RPM's for everything (php libs, php websites, perl modules, C apps, etc) that make up my app. This can be called manually, or through Bamboo. I transfer these RPM's into a yum repo and puppet handles making sure the latest (or correct) versions of software are installed in the cluster.

Could you automate building software packages into MSI's? I think Puppet can manage installation of software packages and versions in Windows.