[ic] Production deployment methods

[Jason Lee]

Hi all,

I'm at the point in my IC (4.9.8) development where our soon to be 
production server is being tested on a regular basis. Soon, this will 
go live soon and I'll be relying on a staging server to make changes 
and test with. Currently this machine is also running Samba so my Mac, 
Linux, and Win machines can do various editing of my store files. For 
production, this will obviously be turned off.

Coming from, mostly, the Java world, this is accomplished by taking the 
web app and performing a hot-deploy it on the app server. But IC is a 
different system and therefore I'm trying to figure out the best way to 
deploy. It will be ok if the server needs to go down for a few mins.

I'd like to be able to edit locally on my machine and push to the prod 
machine or even edit a local network dev server and then test and then 
push to prod. I was thinking about rsync'ing from a stage machine to 
the prod machine, but I would really prefer to use some sort of SSH or 
SCP to get changes out to that prod  machine since if I was ever 
remote, this would work nicely - I wouldn't be just tied to my local 
network to make changes in other words. Nor would other possible 
contributors.

So, does anyone have any suggestions or examples they've used? I'm sure 
some have come across this issue.
Like I said, in the Java world, we used CVS to check out our code base 
on a stage machine and if it passed, then we'd archive the app and push 
out the prod using various scripts that contained SCP/SSH commands in 
them. So something like this would be ideal for me, but I'd like to get 
others input before I embark on this.

TIA,

- jason