deployment

Here's another one of my little Linux admin scripts for all you Drupal developers out there. It's a Linux shell script requiring Drush, MySQL and Subversion, but could be easily modified to work with other databases and repositories and should work fine on a Mac, I think.

Quick post today, no politics *whatsoever*. ;-)

I just wrote another little batch script for deploying my Drupal sites from local to stage. Before I post the code, here's the workflow here in our office at CMS Professionals:

• Code is stored in Subversion away on the Internet (svn.cmspros.co.uk)
• Each developer has a working copy on their laptop
• Database during development is held on central (dedicated) CentOS/MySQL machine on our office LAN

These days, now the Update Status module is core in Drupal 6, people find themselves updating their core, modules and themes far more regularly than before. This is, of course, a very good thing. I'd just like to raise a couple of points of order on the matter:

When updating it is always tempting to copy the contents of the downloaded tar file straight over the existing module or theme. Don't! It is entirely possible there are files with the old version which are not required by the new one. Worse, they may even do some harm.

The other day I expanded on someone else's blog about load testing Drupal with JMeter, by writing about how one can submit forms, and as such potentially handle deployments, with Drupal.

This entry continues on that theme, but looks at scripting your JMeter plans from Linux shell, to make deployment of many JMeter scripts across many different potential environments much, much easier.

If you type Drupal and JMeter in to Google, you'll probably turn up this useful blog post fairly quickly:
http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/john/load-test-your-drupal-application...

This is a great "quick start" guide to basic testing of a Drupal application with JMeter, but it only scratches the surface, by the author's own admission.