Moolah Diaries – Automating Deployment from Travis CI

Thanks to Oncle Tom’s “SSH deploys with Travis CI“, I’ve now fully automated Moolah deployment for both the client and server.

Previously the client was automated using a cronjob that pulled any changes from GitHub, built and ran the tests and if that all worked resync’d the built resources to apache’s docroot. That meant my not-particularly-powerful server was duplicating the build and test steps already happening in Travis CI and there was up to a 10 minute delay before changes went live.

The server didn’t have automated deployments because it has database tests that need an actual database to test against.  I’m crazy, but not crazy enough to run database tests anywhere near real production data.

Now with Travis CI trigging the deployment after the tests have already passed everything is triggered automatically from a git push and it’s a nicely isolated server running all the tests.

I’ve deliberately split the deployment in two – committed to the Moolah codebase is just enough to push the artefacts over to the server and trigger it’s deployment script. The deployment script on the server is managed as part of it’s puppet configuration and controls where things are finally deployed to, manages database migrations etc. That gives a nice clear delineation between the development of the service and the details of how it’s deployed in this particular environment and a simple, clear interface between the two. Now I can change how things work in either the code or the server setup without thinking too much about the other half.