Presentation given at CodeMiami 2013

1. Rock Solid Deployment
of Web Applications
Pablo Godel @pgodel - codemiami.com
Jan 12th 2013 - Miami, FL

2. Who Am I?
⁃ Born in Argentina, living in the US since 1999
⁃ PHP & Symfony developer
⁃ Founder of the original PHP mailing list in spanish
⁃ Co-founder of ServerGrove

4. ServerGrove!
⁃ Founded ServerGrove Networks in 2005
⁃ Provider of web hosting specialized in PHP,
Symfony, ZendFramework, MongoDB and others
⁃ Servers in USA (right here in Miami) and Europe!

5. Community is our teacher
⁃ Very active open source supporter through code
contributions and usergroups/conference sponsoring

6. Deployment
?

7. Deployment
Software deployment is all of the activities that make
a software system available for use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_deployment

8. Deployment
A very important part of
the application life-cycle

9. Deployment
A very important critical part
of the application life-cycle

10. Deployment
It should not be an
after thought

11. Deployment
It should be predictable

12. Deployment
The more you do it the
better it goes

14. Deployment: Goals

15. Deployment: Goals
One-click deploys

16. Deployment: Goals
Continuous deploys

17. Web Apps
Deployment

18. Web Apps
Deployment

19. Web Apps
Deployment

20. Deployment: Goals
Anytime & Anywhere

21. Deployment: Goals
Anyone

22. Deployment: Goals
Reliable

23. Deployment: Goals
Rollbacks

24. Deployment: Goals
No downtime

25. Deployment: Goals
Reusable

26. Deployment: Goals
Scalable

27. Deployment: Goals
• One-click / continuous deploys
• Anytime & Anywhere
• Anyone
• No downtime
• Predictable & Reliable
• Rollbacks
• Reusable
• Scalable

28. Deployment Facts

29. Deployment: Fact #1
Deployment starts with the developer
• Setup development environment to be as close
as possible to productions servers
• Setup test/qa/staging servers
• Use Vagrant to manage VMs
• Use Puppet/Chef to manage OS packages/
configuration

30. Deployment: Fact #2
Success linked to server OS setup
• Use Puppet/Chef to manage OS packages/
configuration
• Create OS packages for 3rd party software
• Setup your own package repositories

31. Deployment: Fact #3
Monitoring is uptime
• Use monitoring tools to know what is going on
with your servers (Ganglia, Cacti, Zabbix, etc.)
• Add monitoring and metrics to your app
(Graphite, StatsD, New Relic)
• Use your logs wisely (Graylog, Logstash, Kibana)

32. Deployment Methodologies

33. Deployment Methodologies
• VIM-style
• FTP uploads
• rsync
• source control (svn, git)
• Build tools (ant, phing)
• Specialized tools (capistrano, fabric, etc)
• Package based (rpm, deb, etc)

34. Web Apps Deployment:
Steps overview

35. Web Apps Deployment:
First time
• Copy files to server(s)
• Set server-side configurations
• Load DB fixtures
• Process and install assets
• Warm up cache
• “Enable” site

36. Web Apps Deployment:
Subsequent times
• Copy files to server(s)
• Apply DB updates (migrations)
• Process and install assets
• Warm up cache
• “Enable” site

37. Deployment: Challenges

38. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Fast & reliable copy of files
Solutions:
• rsync
• git pull
• setup git repo on local network to save
bandwidth and avoid issues if git server is down
(i.e. github)

39. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Scalable
Solutions:
• use a tool that allows to go from 1 to n servers
easily (i.e. capistrano)
• pssh allows to send commands to n servers in
parallel
• package your app in OS packages
like .rpm/.deb to easily install across n servers

40. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Rollbacks
Solutions:
• test!
• tag releases
• dedicated branches (master for production)
• deploy each release in its own directory

41. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Secure
Solutions:
• use ssh based connections
• don’t store passwords on source control
• store sensitive strings (passwords) in server
environment variables

42. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
DB migrations
Solutions:
• Doctrine Migrations
• Consider document oriented DBs like
MongoDB
“The best migrations are the ones you don’t have to do”

43. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Static assets
Solutions:
• YUICompress shrinks JS and CSS file sizes
• Enable web server compression
• Add versioning to static assets links (code.js?v=1)
• Assetic combines multiple files into one
• Run utilities locally or in a staging server, deploy
result

44. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
Caching
Solutions:
• Update one server while others handle load
• Group servers and update group at a time
• execute commands on “finalize” to clear up APC
cache

45. Deployment: Challenges
Challenge:
File permission conflicts
Solutions:
• Run Apache/PHP with same user
• Use php-fpm instead of mod_php
• Create “deploy” user and add web server to the
group
• Use setfacl to give write access to multiple users

46. Web Apps Deployment:
Other common pitfalls

47. Web Apps Deployment:
Other common pitfalls
• Case sensitive filesystems
• Configuration differences
• Outdated 3rd party software
• Github down
$ git daemon --base-path=/git/repo/path/ --
export-all
$ git clone git://127.0.0.1/repo
http://ozmm.org/posts/when_github_goes_down.html

48. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples

49. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Simplest continuous deployment ever!
hook.php
<?php
exec(‘/usr/bin/env -i HOME=/var/www git pull’);
echo “All done!”;
screenshot

50. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
• Ruby based
• Very extensible
• Large number of extensions
• Simple client side installation
$ gem install capistrano

51. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
set :application, "myapp" # Application name
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/myapp"
set :user, "deployer"
set :use_sudo, false # sudo isn't required
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :repository, "git@github.com:user/repo.git"
role :web, "server.example.com", “server2.example.com”

52. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
$ cap deploy:setup

53. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
|-- releases
`-- shared
|-- logs
`-- uploads

54. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
$ cap deploy
$ cap deploy:migrations
$ cap deploy:rollback

55. Web Apps Deployment:
Examples
Capistrano
|-- current
(symlink to releases/20130112)
|-- releases
| `-- 20130112
`-- shared
|-- logs
`-- uploads

56. Web Apps Deployment:
Other options
• Fabric
• WePloy
• Phing
• Magallanes
• Jenkins

57. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools

58. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
App Metrics: StatsD & Graphite

59. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
Logging: Logstash
Ship logs from any source, parse them, get the right
timestamp, index them, and search them

60. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
Logging: Logstash
Configure Apache to log json
LogFormat "{ "@timestamp": "%{%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z}t", "@fields": { "client": "%a",
"duration_usec": %D, "status": %s, "request": "%U%q", "method": "%m", "referrer": "%
{Referer}i" } }" logstash_json
# Write our 'logstash_json' logs to logs/access_json.log
CustomLog logs/access_json.log logstash_json
Result
{ "@timestamp": "2012-08-22T14:35:19-0700", "client": "127.0.0.1",
"duration_usec": 532, "status": 404, "request": "/favicon.ico",
"method": "GET", "referrer": "-" }

61. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
Logging: Graylog

62. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
Logging: Kibana
Kibana is a user friendly way to view, search and visualize
your log data

63. Web Apps Deployment:
Tools
Packaging: fpm
Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.
fpm -s dir -t rpm -n "myapp" -v 1.0 /var/www/myapp
fpm -s dir -t deb -a all -n myapp -v 1.0 /etc/apache2/
conf.d/my.conf /var/www/myapp
https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

64. Web Apps Deployment:
Summary

65. •Stop using FTP

66. •Stop using FTP
•Plan early

67. •Stop using FTP
•Plan early
•Practice

68. •Stop using FTP
•Plan early
•Practice
•Monitor

69. •Stop using FTP
•Plan early
•Practice
•Monitor
•AUTOMATE!

70. QUESTIONS?
Slides: http://slideshare.net/pgodel
Twitter: @pgodel
E-mail: pablo@servergrove.com

71. Thank you!
Slides: http://slideshare.net/pgodel
Twitter: @pgodel
E-mail: pablo@servergrove.com