Continuous Integration, deploy your application quickly and continuously

Drupal can be used as a framework to build big web applications. Still drupal is a content management system. With any CMS, we expect to make changes and deploy as early as possible.

Still most of the time we would not like to take risk of making changes on production environment. We have development boxes and then staging where we test newly developed feature and if every thing is fine, deploy to the production. This is mandatory deployment process for any mission critical application.

However this process also includes risk of human error. Person who deploys application does same task again and again. It is quite possible for him/her to forget some necessary step like enabling any module, forget to upload a file etc, which causes unexpected bugs on production. Again, if developer is changing any critical module, it is quite possible that he fixes his issue but unknowingly introduce another issue, which goes untested on production.

Don’t worry; there is continuous integration (& continuous delivery) process and tools to help you. In this session, we will discuss these tools and process using Jenkins, Phing, Simple Test/PHP Unit, Selenium etc. We will start presentation assuming attendees have no knowledge of above tools. During the presentation, we will learn what these tools are, how to install and configure them and if stuck, where you can find further help.