I'm looking to re-organize the way we release our internal software. All of the code (PHP webapps, some Java apps and Perl scripts) is checked into Subversion repositories but there are no branches or tags, everything is checked into trunk (only around 1-3 devs per app). On the production linux servers, the software is just directly run from a working svn copy (actually most of the changes happen there as well).
Since we have a lot of small apps and release very often small changes to the running system, I'm looking for a very lean or transparent way to do some release engineering and to clean up this mess abit.
Are there any tools out there that may help me to do so in a heterogenous environment (language-wise) like that? Or has anyone an idea how to do this in a proper way?
Otherwise I'd thought of writing some release (shell) scripts that automatically create subversion tags from trunk and then do a checkout of the corresponding tag to the production servers. But that sounds kinda hack'ish as well to me.
Thanks,
Haes.
Continuous Integration is definitely the way to go - any CI (even minimalist batch files) is better than none - but it'll only be as good as the policies you have in place. Since your files don't really end up as a 'binary' or 'distributable', marking a release might merely require only that you tag the repository, or even just stash the Subversion revision number somewhere. The important policy that you need is that any release can be reconstructed whenever you need it - so you can compare current and previous releases, or go back to an older release if something goes wrong. Don't worry about the 'overhead' of creating tags in svn - that's very efficient.
A release script that does the subversion tag sounds fine. A CI implementation (I'd recommend CruiseControl since it's ideal for heterogeneous work, although heterogeneity requires a bit more configuration overhead) is great, since you can automatically kick the process off on a subversion checkin, and run automated tests that determine whether it's good enough to tag or not.
I'd definitely not auto-deploy to a release server. A 'staging area' (call it 'nightly build', 'beta test', whatever) would be better. Let your users bang away on that before you decide it's good enough to roll out onto the production servers. And, as long as you've got the policy in place of being able to rollback to an earlier version, you've mitigated the possibility of a bad roll-out.
The auto-checkout onto production servers is the only 'hackish' part - an automated checkout, test, tag, beta deploy is slick enough. Rolling-out to production shouldn't have an easy button, though.