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Release and Rollback with Robo

·215 words·2 mins
Mike Bell
Author
Mike Bell

I’ve been looking for a release management tool for a while now. There are quite a lot of tools to do this but I just couldn’t get my head into writing XML for most of them.

I decided to take a look at Robo and see what I could do. Since it’s all written in php and can be included in any project with composer it’s dead easy to get to grips with.

My RoboFile.php consists of the following commands:

  • setup - Creates basic directories for use. Use $site to setup path variable.
  • composer:build - Run composer install in your project
  • release - Release a new version of your entire codebase to $site/releases. This also calls composer:build
  • rollback ($version) - Rollback to the last release or if you pass the unix timestamp of the last release it’ll revert to that.

This leaves you with the following:

$site
  /releases
      /123456789
      /123456790
      /current -> 123456789

So you can easily point your web server config to $site/releases/current

I’m not quite happy with using a unix time stamp so will probably replace that with a variable you can pass in as part of the release task.

I think this is a fairly nice way of handling release management, it’s nice to have something that is easy to jump into.