[COLUG] Method of Updating Remote Webservers

[Chris Clonch]

On Saturday 01 March 2008 8:51:00 Josh wrote:
> Howdy Folks,
>
> For those of you with remote webservers: what methods do you use to make
> modifications?
>
> I am working on a public facing site; and my wife is also starting
> promoting herself as a graphic designer.  Because of this, I decided to
> set up a 'dev' server under Xen so I can do changes properly.  Also, it's
> been an adventure teaching her how to update files in the filesystem on
> the webserver using scp...
>
> So, I've set up Subversion and got it working.  My intent is to be able to
> have Eclipse (or other apps) update subversion on the client side, and do
> a script that will automatically update the webserver with the latest
> 'Prod' branch of SVN code.
>
> Then I wondered about the trigger mechanisms for this.  I could always
> just login to the server and do a 'svn co' at the appropriate place.  But
> what fun would that be?  So, I thought of Qpid:
>
> http://cwiki.apache.org/qpid/
> http://mrg.et.redhat.com/page/Main_Page
> http://www.redhat.com/mrg/messaging/
>
> I think it would be spiffy if, on my server, I have a script running,
> listening for messages from a QPid queue.  Then, I would have some applet
> running on my PC (or perhaps in Eclipse) that, when commanded to do so,
> would put a message on the queue, advising the server script to do a 'svn
> co'.  (There are obvious security issues to be hammered out, but I'm at a
> brainstorming point right now.)
>
> There are commercial packages that do this on a monstrously huge scale
> (scheduling jobs, handling job dependencies, etc) for monstrously huge
> sums of money.  Is there anything in the open source realm that does this?
>
> Later,
> -J
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rsync and/or Puppet: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet

It sounds like all you are trying to do is sync the prod server with your prod 
code from your dev box.  If so, rsync would work great.  Puppet can do this 
plus more and is really handy if you have a large number of systems to 
maintain.  Its a little overkill if the number of systems is small.

Qpid sounds cool, but would be a complicated solution to a fairly simple 
problem.

My 2 pennies...

-Chris