I took advantage of therecent update to JPS to experiment a bit with Curtain . I significantly retooled it towards one goal: separate the generation of the deployment package from the deployment itself.
While the initial version of Curtain benefitted from many influences, one I completely forgot to take into account was Alex Papadimoulis’ teachings, more specifically those about release management and database changes . Especially the commandment that builds be immutable and to make sure that what gets deployed on production is the same thing that got deployed on the earlier environments.
When I recently re-read those two articles for inspiration at work, I thought: “Uh, oh.”
Indeed, with Curtain the deployment process is not only a function of the revision that we ultimately want there, but also of what was previously there , in order to support proper rollover of resources (itself necessary because of offline support). And as originally designed, Curtain would just adapt its deployment to what was previously there, which means that, if I wasn’t careful and did not double check that staging was properly rolled back to what is present in production (which let’s admit, we’ve all done at some point), then the Curtain deployment to staging would not be representative of the eventual deployment to production. Oops.
So Curtain has been updated to, rather than perform the deployment itself, instead generate a package containing the generated files; this package doubles as a python script which, when invoked, will perform all the deployment steps to the target of choice. The script itself is dumb and takes no decisions, such that it can be invoked multiple times and perform always the same job, but it also checks prior to operating that the data previously present corresponds to the expectations it was generated with. That way, we can use the same script multiple times, once on staging and once on production, and be certain that the two deployments will be the same. And Alex will be happy.
One more thing. In myinitial post, I also completely forgot to mention another influence: Deployinator . Many aspects of Curtain come from Deployinator: deployment as a single operation, deploying assets as a layer separate from code, and versioning these assets as part of the URL, etc. The lessons from Deployinator were so obvious to me that it did not even occur to me to mention where they came from. That omission has now been repaired.