To those who are doing this, I have a question. How distributed is your production environment? How is deploying the app, starting/stopping background services, etc... handled on multiple machines?
fab release pull update touch
The above will work on release version, will pull in changes from repo (hg in my case), will update to tip (or any tag I want), remove any *.pyc files and recompile and finally touch wsgi file. All these (release, pull, update, touch) are custom written python functions using fabric library.
If I want to restart apache, I use this (could have combined it with previous example and it would work)
fab apache_restart
Fabric is joy to use, very easy to write powerful deployment scripts and has good documentation: highly recommended.
If someone has a link to a good article / book / video about best practices with this, please post it?
There's a lot of talk about how someone did massively scallable systems or deployments (and it's really interesting, lots of cool engineering problems & solutions there), but a real world "here's what we figured works really well for us for a smaller-scale distributed operation" would be really useful, too.