Question

I have a standard-ish setup. Call it three servers – www, app and db, all fed from fabric scripts, and the whole on github.

I have a local laptop with the repo clone. I change a file locally, and push it to github then deploy using jenkins – which pulls from github and does its business. The problem here is I can put a dozen rubbish commits up till I manage to fix all my typos.

Its not so much the round trip to github that matters, but the sheer number of commits – I cannot squash them as they have been pushed. It looks ugly. It works sure but it is ugly.

I don’t think I can edit on the servers directly – the file are spread out a lot, and I cannot make each directory on three servers a clone of github and hope to keep things sane.
And trying to write scripts that will synch the servers with my local repo is insane – fabric files took long enough.

I cannot easily git pull from jenkins, because I still have to commit to have jenkins pull, and we still get ugly ugly commit logs.

I cannot see a graceful way to do this – ideas anyone.

Answer 1

The solution is to not use github / jenkins to deploy to the servers.
The servers should be seen as part of the ‘local’ deployment (local being pre-commit)
So use the fab files directly, from my laptop.

That was harder because of pre processing occuring on jenkins but that is replicable.

So, I shall take Jeff Atwoods advice here

• embrace the suck, in public.

Well I certainly sucked at that – but hey I learnt.

Will put brain in the right way tomorrow.