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Plesk can be handy if you want to get a simple hosting situation up and running but is an absolute nightmare if you want to get into any nitty gritty on the server that might require some custom configuration. So how do you go about installing Symfony on a server running Plesk? As it is one of the common frameworks that we frequently need to be installing, I thought it worthwhile publishing my notes on the steps we need to take:
To allow deployment via rsync from Symfony – in Plesk, enable user to access via SSH by checking: “Shell access to server with FTP user’s credentials (/bin/sh)”
We are a small development team, at Harvest Digital, handling multiple tasks throughout the day, across different environments and projects. It makes for an exciting challenge. Our roles/ skills are clearly defined and our small size means we can react quickly to change, with little margin for communication errors and so on (see Getting Real and Less is more: Jumpstarting Productivity with Small Teams). But, when it comes to deploying to a staging or production server, I am ashamed to admit that we had often introduced a huge potential for human error by doing much of the work manually. Each project is different and so there is no consistent deployment process across the board.
Deployment is often the last step in the process to get any attention and it is one that can be unnecessarily tedious and prone to error. With more agile development projects, where deployments may be required several times a day, we obviously cannot afford the time nor the potential mistakes that may be made by manually deploying a project.
At its simplest level, deployment may just involve making sure that the target server (i.e. staging or production) has the latest revision of files from the project’s source control repository (we use SVN). But factor in tests and database migration and you can see how easily things can go wrong. Especially if you are deploying several times a day. You need to automate as many steps in the process as possible, thereby eliminating any manual tasks that introduce potential error and duplication.
Whenever we reach a point in a project where the code can be considered stable, we should tag it in SVN as a release. This gives you the ability to deploy a particular release based on its tag, instead of just the latest revision in the repository. By convention you never create revisions in the tag folder – tags are simply named snapshots of the source repository. We typically use version numbers as tags with some scheme based on feature-set or milestone and release date that can be ordered alpha-numerically e.g. “rel_belfast_2.04”. This allows us to say with certainty what is deployed at any one time, without having to scan logs etc. Tags give context to a release name (you can easily associate the release with project milestones) that revision numbers and timestamps do not. Tags are usually kept in a ‘tags’ subfolder, in the top level of the repository.
For a while now at Harvest, we’ve been working with symfony – an excellent PHP framework – that includes a few tools to help simplify the deployment process (such as Pake). These tools allow for remote syncronisation of files with rsync (the benefits of synchronisation over standard FTP are much touted elsewhere) via SSH (with the shell command: e.g.
) and semi-automate the build process (including database schema changes, data dumps etc: e.g.
) by using Pake on the target machine.
But there is still a lot of room for improvement, particularly when it comes to database migrations and SVN integration. Plus, symfony is not our only set-up. We need an automated deployment process that can be applied across all our projects. This is where I’ve previously seen shell scripts being used but Phing can do much of this heavy lifting work for us, as it has many standard deployment tasks built-in to it. According to the Phing blurb:
Features include file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.
Phing (PHing Is Not GNU make) is a project build system based on Apache Ant and is available through the PEAR installer. If you use
on Phing, it’ll grab, funnily enough, all the dependencies. But most are good packages (e.g. PHPUnit, PHPdoc and VersionControl_SVN). It can be used in a multitude of ways, including unit testing, creating docs, running SQL – which allows us to keep database schema changes in version control. The beauty of Phing is everything can be configured easily through the build.xml file (and then further with properties files) – so that the project’s deployment configuration can be kept in version control too.
In short, we love this thing called Phing!
For more detail on advanced tasks such as database migration take a look at these posts from Federico Cargnelutti and Dave Marshall.
It looks like the semantic web is about to gain traction with the Yahoo! Search open platform that was announced last month. In summary, Yahoo! is hoping to spread the use of semantic web standards by supporting microformats and RDF – promising enhanced search results for content adhering to such standards.
And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.
[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes – I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article – essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after “Web” for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]
The “social graph” is a global mapping of everybody and how they’re related. I had a play with a visualisation tool for Facebook relationships last night and it was great. Slightly scary but fun nonetheless. However, our weblives are not just about Facebook (although Facebook does provide a platform to bring them all together). Google’s OpenSocial is promising to provide another way to pull them together but, as Brad Fitzpatrick points out, a centralized “owner” of the social graph is a dangerous thing. Social networks need to be made open and portable. And they can be.
Tim Berners-Lee stated in a post yesterday that
…we have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology…
In other words, the connections and relationships made possible by the semantic web (or social graph – use interchangeably from hereon). He goes on:
Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.
and on opening up this data:
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.
So, yes – I am excited but how are we going to do this? Think data feeds, microformats and openID – things that would tend to be met with blank stares if I were to suggest them to clients. But show a client how you could remove barriers (such as log-in/ sign-up) to that all important “conversion” (with openID or microformats – here’s an excellent microformat implementation doing just that) and show how this person would be able to instantly tell all their friends about it (via their social graph) and then they’ll be interested.
With all the feeds available from the various apps that make up my weblife these days, there’s a wealth of data that can be brought together into a single data stream – or “lifestream“, if you will. Using Yahoo! Pipes to mash up these feeds, I’ve hacked together something that displays all this fantastic data on one page – with the idea of this eventually being displayed on a timeline. I don’t expect the hordes will be rushing to view my aggregated weblife in a single life stream but there are some rather nice applications for this in a wider micro-blogging context.
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Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are gaining credibility as a buzzword in the interweb playground right now and there’s a new kid in class.
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I stumbled across this rather slick video this morning, introducing how internet technology is evolving. I quite like it…
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In relation to my previous post, I’ve just found an article from the man that started whole Web 2.0 buzz – he’s saying much the same as me. Only better.
In the wake of Bill Gate’s media spin last week, Microsoft announces a “strategic shift”. The new services will be called Windows Live and Office Live, and Mr Gates said they were “a revolution in how we think about software”.
Hmm. Forgive me but haven’t we all been using applications “online and on demand” for a while now? To unashamedly use a meme that’s been bashed about for the last year or so – it’s all about this “Web 2.0” stuff, innit?
Web services like Flickr, Writely, inetWord and even MSExchange all offer feature rich applications as “online and on demand” software. And with broadband use becoming increasingly prolific, the thin-client model is now a feasible direction for certain applications. I can see that embedded advertising within these applications is a way to make money – particularly for the likes of Microsoft. But I guarantee the developer community will quickly find a way to outrun the displaying of these embedded adverts.
Either way – is this the beginning of the end for CD installed software? Maybe one day even our operating systems will be online…
it looks like somebody has written an inheritable framework for web controls that produce xhtml 1.0 strict compliant code. excellent! it’s only in beta but certainly a step in the right direction. they say they won’t be releasing source code, so i wonder how much they’ll be charging?
i went to the .net roadshow on wednesday and was suitably sold to by microsoft geeks. the new .net framework actually looks like a great development platform and visual studio is a rather nice coding environment. i just couldn’t get my head around microsoft’s claim to enable “cross-platform delivery”. yeah right – as long as it’s a microsoft platform.
and the code it spits out – ergh! it is such a shame – server side controls and the idea of coding behind pages are the best ideas to come out of .net and are on the path of enlightenment to separating logic from presentation (in much the same way as jakarta’s mvc framework that i’ve gotten so used to in struts). but the html code that things like asp:form tags spew out is ridiculous. microsoft sits on the w3c standards board and built .net from scratch but still can’t develop these controls to output valid html (let alone xhtml)! i guess this same company can’t build a compliant web page on their own site either so at least they’re consistent.
it looks like i’m going to have to spend a lot of unnecessary time overriding all server side controls using customized Render() methods to output what i want. not ideal. with any luck microsoft will listen to the development community and change this annoying “feature”.