Question

I’d very much appreciate anyone sharing best-practices, patterns, anti-patterns, backup, rollback processes that you have formulated for a pain-free, foolproof, Play framework upgrade.

I’m thinking just replacing the bin/play directory with the latest version can cause problems

Edit:

I’m looking for more specific version management strategies, say,

a) Do you just have /bin/play directory having the latest play version or
b) Do you keep versions like /bin/play-1.1 /bin/play-1.2 and change your $PATH to point to the latest (cons: you have to rebuild your modules, dependencies & libs; pros: gives better control over rollback)

Answer 1

I prefer to install play from source using git:

git clone git://github.com/playframework/play.git
cd play

# checkout specific version
git checkout 1.2.1

cd framework
ant
cd ..
ln -s $PWD/play ~/bin

So I have a full install including all source. Later, when play was updated to version 1.2.2 I did the following:

cd <play_home>
git pull
git checkout 1.2.2
cd framework
ant

In your application you then do

play clean && play run

The advantage of running play from a source build is that you can always and easily roll back to the previous version or even test out features from current development. This does not solve the problem of having multiple versions of play active at the same time though.