[p4] Deployment files in Perforce or Maven?

[Shawn Hladky]

We use a separate Perforce instance for deployment, and have been pretty
happy with the results.  Our current system supports deployment to 8 QA
environments plus production.  Our web servers ( ~ 50 in production) have
400k files... and Perforce's ability to quickly do incremental syncs is
invaluable.  Every day we have changes, and we can just run p4 sync and let
Perforce do the hard work.  We do have to be a careful not to swamp the
Perforce server, but there are only a handful of people that run the
deployments, so it's manageable.

Our model is essentially that each environment is a organized like a branch,
and releases are promoted between environments by integrating between
branches.  We did have to build some automation, and implement a number
process to get everything right.  But there are a number of good
side-effects to this.  Rollbacks are extremely easy.  Config files are
submitted, so we have full traceability on configuration changes. Diffing
and history are helpful when troubleshooting issues.

On 1/9/07, Ed Mack <Ed.Mack at attachmate.com> wrote:
>
> We have considered these approaches--using a separate Perforce server
> for releases, or using Maven.
>
> Can Maven be used exclusively for deployment (and not for builds)?  Can
> it keep track of all of the released versions of your own components?
> My research hasn't found good answers to these questions.
>
> Thanks,
> Ed
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> > [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Heck, Joe
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 9:56 AM
> > To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> > Subject: Re: [p4] Deployment files in Perforce or Maven?
> >
> > This kind of choice is very particular to your organization. In our
> > case, we started with a jars and so forth scattered about our
> > infrastructure, moved a while ago to start using a common location in
> > Perforce, and most recently have moved to Maven2 - but not because of
> > storage, more because it significantly helped with dependency maps and
> > knowing what was going into any given application.
> >
> > -joe
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> > [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of
> > vegard.setrenes at telenor.com
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:47 AM
> > To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> > Subject: [p4] Deployment files in Perforce or Maven?
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > In my department we use Perforce on all Java development, and we have
> > been following the "best practice" of not storing anything in
> > the depot,
> > other than what's necessary to do a build. In other words, we don't
> > check in binary archive files like EARs and JARs.
> >
> > The source code for one of our systems was imported from cvs one year
> > ago. We have some deployment scripts that depend on
> > retrieving EARs and
> > JARs from dedicated deployment directories in the same old cvs. These
> > scripts copy the deployment files to multiple test or production
> > servers.
> >
> > To be able to finally get rid of the cvs base, we are looking for the
> > best way of keeping the deployment files. Should we use Perforce or a
> > web based Maven repository?
> >
> > It is clear that we do not need all historic revisions of the
> > files. We
> > are just looking for a good way to make them available for
> > the automated
> > deployment scripts. So I guess we could specify the +S modifier for a
> > designated part of the Perforce depot. But ideally there
> > should be a way
> > to keep just the N last revisions, making it possible for the
> > deployment
> > scripts to do rollbacks. Is this possible without using the obliterate
> > command?
> >
> > How do you organize your deployment files in your organization?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > - Vegard
> >
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> >
>
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