This is a small sidekick for this post. People often complain that automating the deployment line is sooooooo hard. It isn’t. This post explains the simplest way to automate something with the less possible effort.
So in order to automate your deployment process, follow this 5 simple steps:
1) start a wiki page and put on all steps that are needed to perform the release. Write them down as commands that can be copy and pasted.
2) Do 2-3 releases by the instructions. Really copy and paste the commands from the wiki page. If something is missing – add it. If something is wrong – fix it.
3) After you finished 2 releases without changes to the wiki page start writing scripts. Have one directory, put all the scripts there, put the commands into the scripts. Organize them by target servers or target applications, whatever works for you. Replace commands on the wiki page with scripts to call. Repeat until all commands are replaced.
4) Install a jenkins (with tomcat). Add new job to jenkins and configure it to call the scripts, you created in 3. Put a link to the jenkins on the wiki page and remove all other information.
5) Buy a t-shirt with “Automate!” on it.
NOW Celebrate!
