Wordpress deployment

Genesis: a deployment tool for Wordpress.

Vagrant

Vagrant assembles development environments to spec using (I think) VMware.

Software development and Romney's loss

A couple of good articles about the Romney campaign's snazzy new GOTV tool, Orca, which went down in a blaze of glory, much like the iconic picture of his blimp, but for entirely predictable reasons: insufficient testing, apparently in part because of a misplaced urge to centralization and secrecy, and way insufficient user training, along with some operational foulups (sending out incorrect passwords to users, etc.)  It was a fiasco in every sense of the term.

It was downright corporate.

Fabric

Wow.  Fabric is a Python module/utility that allows you to turn Unix commands on the local or remote system into building blocks.  This is just so cool.

Deployment to a VM

So testing deployment should be pretty easy if I have a VM to test against.  (I'm looking at VMs again due to OpenLogos, natch).  The idea is basically to fire up a blank VM of the OS in question, then run scripts against it to build ... whatever.  The "whatever" then being a deliverable VM, but built using a deliverable, repeatable script.  And that script could then itself be an expression of the higher-level deployment description language I envision (and that already exists in other deployment tools).

Ah.  VirtualBox has a command-line interface.

Arch Linux

Another simple distro.

Couple more deployment links

First is Bower, a "package manager for the Web".  (Allows you to install packages into a Webapp for development.)

Then there's Yeoman, which scaffolds out various Webapp formats based on questions asked.

Shipping a Common Lisp app on Windows

I wrestle with this sort of post.  Am I honestly ever going to ship a Common Lisp app on Windows?  Of course not.  And yet...  How it works is somehow oddly compelling.

Server performance tips

Here are a couple of good overviews of best practices for fast Websites.

• Yahoo!'s best practices.
• Some guy in London's recommendations.

Time for another survey.

Configuration management tools suck

A state-of-the-art look at configuration management. And it sucks. That makes me interested.

Puppet vs. Chef

As deployment solutions (at least in the Ruby world) Puppet and Chef are turning out to be pretty popular. Neither jumps out at me as a really beautiful syntax, but deployment (i.e. system configuration) strikes me as a sensible thing to start analyzing, starting with Puppet and Chef. What are their commonalities? What are their differences? How interchangeable are they?

Vagrant

This was on my to-do list, and now I don't have to mess with it. Vagrant sets up VirtualBox environments to spec (I think).

There's also a new online variant of the same idea: StackRocket.

Deployment configuration: static site on e.g. S3

There's been a little run on the notion of publishing static sites to high-availability cloud servers that's kind of cool. Definitely a nice tool for the toolbox.

• "High Scalability" blog (follow up!) has a strategy post to this effect with good analysis.
• Jekyll is one such option for blogging.

Website strategy

So for a while I've put strategy kinds of things over on the startup ideas blog. And insofar as strategy regards the underlying business, that's probably a good thing. But some Website strategy is a question of proper deployment - proper design of the environment that a site is operating in. And that should be here, I think.

To that end:

• Agiliq's quick Website checklist [part1] [part2] - part 2 has a list of other checklists.
• A neat trick: Using Adwords to comparison test different names for a service.

OK, so especially the checklist is something that should probably be in a semantic domain. I think really the whole business-process-and-strategy domain should be a Decl domain in some way. Whatever the hell that means for the future.

And certainly some of it should be in a list of deployment patterns/boilerplate.

SetupBot

The SetupBot is a set of automagical scripts that install Wordpress for you. A good starting point for considering deployment in general.

DIY node.js server on EC2

Here is a really nice blow-by-blow set of instructions for setting up a good node.js server on EC2. Recall that I also wanted to do more or less the same thing for VirtualBox setups. Clearly, what's needed is a semantic description of operating environments, maybe a Deployment::Decl or something. Anyway, bear in mind. Node.js needs more investigation anyway.