Options for deploying PHP applications

Guidelines for deploying PHP applications
By Kevin Schroeder
Technology Evangelist
Zend Technologies

About me
Kevin Schroeder
Technology Evangelist for Zend
Programmer
Sys Admin
Author
IBM i Programmer’s Guide to PHP
You want to do WHAT with PHP?
Coming up
Race Ferraris on the weekend
My Honda has a dismal win record

If you have a question you can
Type in the Q&A panel
Follow us!
Zend Technologies
http://twitter.com/zend
http://twitter.com/kpschrade (me!)

Agenda
What we will be talking about
Deployment->Testing->Staging->Production
Rsync/SVN/PEAR/yum mechanisms
What we will not be talking about
Build tools (Phing, Maven, etc.)
Database versioning/deployment
Continuous Integration
MSI installs (Sorry MS folks, I really wanted to but, y’know, time)
Test-Driven Development

Application Stages
| 5
Increasing Maturity of PHP Applications
Development
Testing/QA
Staging
Production

Maturity
| 6
Increasing Maturity of PHP Applications
Uptime!!
Testing & Validating Environment
Testing & Validating Application
Distinct Dev Environments
Benefit
Where are you?
Structure

Development
Purpose
To provide developers an environment to write their code
Characteristics
Should be similar to production, though it usually isn’t
Often more open security
Usually local to the developer, though not required

Testing
Purpose
To provide a non-programming environment to test functionality
Characteristics
Continuous Integration could be included
Generally no development occurs, only testing
Developers should not do the testing, if possible
Restricted outbound networking
Use Zend Server Monitoring and Code Tracing to help reproduce errors

Prepared for and handed off to System Administrators
(the stuff we’re here to talk about)

Staging
Purpose
To test your deployment process/scripting (not your code)
Characteristics
Developers generally do not have access, unless they are also the sysadmin
Very restricted outbound networking
Mirrors production as best as possible

Change Control
A formal process used to ensure that changes are introduced in a controlled and coordinated manner
Protect against unnecessary changes introduced to a system without forethought
Requires documenting the release process
Software version number
Plans for rollback (tested? y/n)
Expected outage time
Customer impact
Done prior to doing anything in production

Pre-Production (Optional)
Purpose
Test the code in the production environment without impacting customers
Characteristics
Not likely to have use in the cloud or large scale deployments
Deployed in production immediately prior to making it live
Test the application with production settings without customer interaction

Production
Purpose
Do whatever it is that it’s supposed to be doing
Characteristics
Developers do not have access (as they might be tempted to fix something)
Deployment should be done without requiring developer input
Very limited inbound traffic – generally only the service that is being served. i.e. HTTP

Application considerations
Build the application to be aware of different environments
Zend_Config_* is good at this
Do not set the environment type in your code
Environment variables can be placed in server config
It means that you won’t accidentally keep your development settings turned on in production
Make production your default environment
Keeps accidental data leakage to a minimum

Deployment Option 1 – rsync
Benefits
Easy
Already installed on your system
Drawbacks
No deployment script can be run
Not integrated with either PHP or the OS
Rollbacks require rolling back the entire source server
Does not understand versioning
One option is to move the source tree prior to the rsync
Uses xinetd

Deployment Option 2 – Source Control
Benefits
Easy
You should already be using source control
Has versioning
Can have pre/post install scripts
Easy to do automatic deployments
Drawbacks
Do you want to put details on how to access your source code on your production box?
Requires that your source control is accessible from production
Deny access to .svn directories

Deployment Option 3 – PEAR
Benefits
Designed for PHP
Very scriptable
Natural for doing things like clearing a cache
Has a better understanding of PHP
Cross platform compatible
Drawbacks
Requires admins to be familiar with PHP code
Limited to PHP deployment
Available tooling is restrictive/build your own package.xml

Deployment Option 4 - OS-based
Benefits
Easily added as part of your server deployment
Very cloud friendly
Admins already know how to use it
Can describe OS-requirements
Downtime limited to actual install, not network transfer time
Drawbacks
Depends on environment
Any PHP deployment scripting needs to be deployed with the application and executed in %post hook
E.g. Invalidating the cache

Which should you use?
Need something simple? rsync
Need to deploy to multiple disparate platforms? PEAR
Need to deploy internally/with minimal developer input?OS (yum/apt)
If using the OS consider maintaining an internal “blessed” repository instead of depending on the distribution

Continuous Deployment
Using automated deployment
Very tight end-to-end integration
Requires a lot of trust that the developers have a fully tested application w/ backend and frontend code
Probably more work to manage if you can count the servers in your production environment with your fingers
Could be beneficial but make sure you know what you’re doing
You will need to have several testing experts

Takeaways
No need for copy-and-paste deployment
No need for (S)FTP
Have an easy rollback mechanism
Prepare for errors in deployment
Try to minimize the amount of scripting needed for deployment
Consider using VMs on anything important to keep downtime to zero

If you have a question you can
Type in the Q&A panel
Follow us!
Zend Technologies
http://twitter.com/zend
http://twitter.com/kpschrade (me!)

Get this information and all the examples at eschrade.com… once I’ve written it

http://www.eschrade.com	1781
http://eschrade.com	7
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	3
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	2

Options for deploying PHP applications

by Kevin Schroeder on Jun 17, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

4 Embeds 1,793

Statistics

Options for deploying PHP applications — Presentation Transcript