Best practices for deploying tools & scripts to production?

Question

I\'ve got a number of batch processes that run behind the scenes for a Linux/PHP website. They are starting to grow in number and complexity, so I want to bring a small amount o

Answer 1

Create your own packages in the format your distribution uses, e.g. Debian packages (.deb). These can either be copied to each machine and installed manually, or you can set up your own repository, and add it to your list of sources.

Your packages should be set up so that the scripts they contain consult a configuration file, which is different on each host, depending on what scripts need to be run on each.

To tie it all together, you can create a meta package that just depends on each of the other packages you create. That way, when you set up a new server, you install that one meta package, and the other packages are brought in as dependencies.

Although this process sounds a bit complicated, if you have many scripts and many hosts to deploy them to, it can really pay off in the long run.