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Comment by hdra | Hacker News Reader

I have been trying to get a grasp on your second point, but to this day, I still haven't been able to really come to terms with it.

Is there any total noobs guide to automated deployment? Everything I have seen to this day assumes some knowledge of sysops and the whole ecosystem of that specific deployment tool (e.g. like it assumes I knew what is a 'cookbook', or where to find them, etc). It would be great if there is a guide for people like me that doesn't assume any knowledge from the reader aside from development / basic local deployment.

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This article[1] is what made chef 'click' for me. Try it out with vagrant or just solo on a vm to start. Try to forget everything you already learned and just do this example the build off that.

[1] http://www.opinionatedprogrammer.com/2011/06/chef-solo-tutor...

Try fabric

It's a lightweight management tool, like writing a shell script in python, but easier and targeted towards system deployment, really

you only have to get around its unintuitive calling convention (not inside the script - it's the way you use the cmd line tool) but otherwise it's a breeze

Chef/Puppet are harder (as in, you really have to fit their paradigms)

I haven't really looked into it, but how does that differ from using say, a shell script file?

I might be saying this incorrectly, but...

with Fabric you are writing shell scripts in python, so you can have people who doesn't know how to read complex(?) shell scripts be able to read/write/modify your deploy scripts.

It's similar to using a shell script except you're using Python and have access to all of Python's modules and fabric is written with roles and remote management in mind so it makes tasks easier. I love it and even use it to deploy my jekyl blog.

It makes it really easy to target ssh hosts and tell them to do things remotely, while also doing things locally, in one or more scripts.

Writing the functionality of Fabric in shell would take you a long time and give you something which was buggy and inflexible. Someone else wrote it in Python for you. There's no good reason to write it in shell.

This doesn't really answer the grandparent's question. "Try fabric" is good advice for someone that knows (a) what he wants to do and (b) how to do it using a bunch of shell scripts, but prefers Python instead. That's quite far from a "total noob" starting point.

Try out fabric, start really, really, really small.

I'll assume you use Git (if not, replace with your workflow). A super simple fabric script might simply be a `git push`. Instead of typing "git push origin master" in order to push to github/bitbucket/wherever, you'd run "fab deploy". Not going to go into the fabric specifics, but deploy() would pretty much just call git push.

Anyway, that may have confused you even more. My point is, start with something incredibly simple. After you've added git push, you can add to your fabfile.py to ssh into the server, and run git pull. Then add in something to run south migrations. Then collectstatic. Eventually you'll build to something that you can simply run, and everything will be updated and all good.

I think I should explain my point a little more. Chef and Puppet are a different category of tools compared to Fabric. It is comparable to the difference between a Makefile and a shell script.

Chef/Puppet are like Makefiles, it would rebuild the targets if they don't exist. If it is already in the desired state, running the script performs nothing. This is not the case with Fabric. Fabric scripts would usually always perform the required action (unless you have written checks explicitly).

Fabric is a low hanging fruit so I would suggest starting there until you really have the need to manage multiple servers and then use Chef/Puppet.

I would have a hard time recommending Chef and Puppet unless you wrap your deployed unit in a .deb or .rpm file with pre and post install scripts.

Puppet is not really great at executing a sequence of steps because it is declarative: you can always express sequence as dependencies (e.g., reload nginx when file X has changed), but for fine grained steps (e.g., create a softlink for the latest version of your code), it's less convenient.

It's also slower than a Fabric script. If I want to revert to a previous version, I just do "fab revert myapp". With puppet I would have to rerun the puppet agent/change a manifest/change the version in my rpm repository/...

We heavily use puppet to manage our servers, but we rely on Fabric for deployment tasks.

If you're working with python, I would recommend looking at buildout first. The best part of working with plone lately has been learning bootstrap. For working with Django and buildoout see eg:

http://www.slideshare.net/zerok/django-buildout-en-presentat... http://www.sophomoredev.com/2012/06/how-i-use-django-virtual...

As for managing deployments and general devops, I am currently looking at ansible.

> Is there any total noobs guide to automated deployment? Everything I have seen to this day assumes some knowledge of sysops and the whole ecosystem of that specific deployment tool (e.g. like it assumes I knew what is a 'cookbook', or where to find them, etc).

You need to have some knowledge of sysops to use automated deployment tools. I guess it's why they were created in the first place, i.e. not for beginners but for those with enough knowledge/skill to automate tedious sys admin tasks. Perhaps the best solution for you is to use a PaaS like Heroku, EngineYard, Google App Engine, etc.

I am currently using Heroku for live apps, and it is indeed simple enough to use without having to do all these things, but one thing that I intend to use is to automate my VMs setup. I am currently using Vagrant to automate some system configuration such as security keys and port forwarding, but I still install all my packages manually.

I am not looking to be so proficient that I can handle a production server, but I do wish that I can automate some of my development workflow.

For the true beginner, it's tough to beat Heroku. Their documentation on how to deploy is pretty sound. It's as simple as a "git push" to deploy your application. Once you're comfortable with that, it's not too bad to slowly move stuff over to EC2 using your own tools (eg. Fabric).

That is indeed how I work (play) today. So, using these automated deployment tools have little benefit in a PAAS ecosystem?

That's my understanding. Basically... these tools give you more fine-grained control at the expense of configuration & maintenance burdens. Classic PAAS tradeoffs.

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