Recently I have been told "Chris, you're a great developer but a terrible sysadmin." Considering how often I muck-up the box that hosts my various web sites, there might be some truth to that. So now I'm trying to be less of a sucky sysadmin and find solutions that both myself (and my poor friend Sean who cleans up my sysadmin messes).

When one of my employer's new sites was about to be launched one of the tasks I was given was to come up with an automated deployment system instead of the do-everything-by-hand system that we have in place now. In-house, there was already a web-based tool that would export stuff from the CVS repository but anything else had to be done by hand.

Being a Rails fan, I had known about <a href="//manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/97"">Capistrano (used to be called Switchtower but they ran into some copyright issues on that name) but was unsure how it would work with a non-Rails app. I did manage to hack something together but wasn't entirely happy with it.

In the end, the project had scaled down quite a bit (only one server instead of the three they had planned for) so the manual system is okay for now. But I was still frustrated by not having an elegant, CLI solution to deploy the site. I had toyed around with the idea of writing my own Capistrano clone for PHP (as source material for another I googled around some more today and found that Geoffrey Grosenbach (Rails guy and main force behind the Ruby on Rails podcast) <a href="//nubyonrails.com/articles/read/460"">had done the same thing, but only better.

Looking at that blog posting makes me realize that it's possible to use Capistrano to distribute PHP apps. Wish this had been around at my old gig...