Deployment with Zend Server (Part 8 of 8)

This is the final in a series of eight posts detailing tips on deploying to Zend Server. The previous post in the series detailed using the Zend Server SDK to deploy your Zend Server deployment packages (ZPKs) from the command line.

Today, I'll detail how I automate deployment with zf-deploy and zs-client (the Zend Server SDK), and wrap up the series with some closing thoughts.

Tip 8: Automate

Over the course of the series:

I've defined Job Queue scripts for scheduled tasks I want to run.
I've defined deployment scripts to automate deployment tasks on the server, including scheduling the above Job Queue scripts, as well as to prep the environment for my application.
I'm using zf-deploy to create ZPK packages to push to the server, which contain the above scripts, as well as my deployment configuration.
I'm using the Zend Server SDK to deploy our ZPK.

But it's a bunch of manual steps. What if I could automate it?

There are a ton of tools for this sort of thing. I could write a shell script. I could use Phing.

I personally like to use make for this (yeah, I'm a dinosaur). As an example:

PHP ?= $(shell which php)
VERSION ?= $(shell date -u +"%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M")
CONFIGS ?= $(CURDIR)/../site-settings
ZSCLIENT ?= zs-client.phar
ZSTARGET ?= mwop

COMPOSER = $(CURDIR)/composer.phar

.PHONY : all composer zpk deploy clean

all : deploy

composer :
    @echo "Ensuring composer is up-to-date..."
    -$(COMPOSER) self-update
    @echo "[DONE] Ensuring composer is up-to-date..."

zpk : composer
    @echo "Creating zpk..."
    -$(CURDIR)/vendor/bin/zfdeploy.php build mwop-$(VERSION).zpk --configs=$(CONFIGS) --zpkdata=$(CURDIR)/zpk --version=$(VERSION)
    @echo "[DONE] Creating zpk."

deploy : zpk
    @echo "Deploying ZPK..."
    -$(ZSCLIENT) applicationUpdate --appId=20 --appPackage=mwop-$(VERSION).zpk --target=$(ZSTARGET)
    @echo "[DONE] Deploying ZPK."

clean :
    @echo "Cleaning up..."
    -rm -Rf $(CURDIR)/*.zpk
    @echo "[DONE] Cleaning up."

The above ensures my ZPKs have versioned names, allowing me to keep the last few in the working directory for reference; the clean target will remove them for me when I'm ready. Using make also gives me some granularity; if I want to build the ZPK only, so I can inspect it, I can use make zpk.

Of course, if there's any other pre- or post-processing I want to do as part of my build process, I can do that as well. (In my actual script, I do some pre-processing tasks.)

The main takeaway, though, is: automate the steps. This makes it trivial for you to deploy when you want to, and the more trivial you make deployment, the more likely you are to push new changes with confidence.

Closing Thoughts

I've been quite happy with my experiments using Zend Server, and have become quite confident with the various jobs and deployment scripts and jobs I've written. They make deployment trivial, which is something I'm quite happy with. I'm even happier having my site on AWS, as it gives me some options for scaling should I need them later.

With the tricks and tips in this series, hopefully you'll find yourself successfully deploying your applications to Zend Server!