> At one company I worked at, we had a system where each deploy got its own folder, and we'd update a symlink to point to the active one. It worked, but it was all manual, all custom, and all fragile.
The first time I saw this I thought it was one of the most elegant solutions I'd ever seen working in technology. Safe to deploy the files, atomic switch over per machine, and trivial to rollback.
It may have been manual, but I'd worked with a deployment processes that involved manually copying files to dozens of boxes and following 10 to 20 step process of manual commands on each box. Even when I first got to use automated deployment tooling in the company I worked at it was fragile, opaque and a configuration nightmare, built primarily for OS installation of new servers and being forced to work with applications.