Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches

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Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You: MicroISV on a Shoestring

One nice thing about keeping your server configuration in scripts rather than just splayed across fifteen different places on the server (/etc/environment, /etc/crontab, /usr/local/nginx/conf/apps/AppName.conf, etc) is that it lives in source control. Your cron jobs? If they’re in source control, you’ll have a written record of what they are, what they’re supposed to do, and why they just blew up when you bork the underlying assumptions eight months down the line. Your Nginx config? If it is in source control, you’ll understand why you added that new location setting for static images only. The voodoo in your postfix config? A suitably descriptive commit note means you’ll never have to think about reproducing the voodoo again.