Any ideas on remote deployment?

[Roman Burdakov]

Greetings, I need to make one deployment server for various apps (java, .net, flex). The purpose of this server is to provide handy tool for build, package and remotely deploy our apps to the different environments. So here is how I see it now step by step:

1. Check out code from ClearCase, clean, build, package/publish
2. Upload files (war, ear, ...) to the specific environments (test, staging, production, etc)
3. Call command on the remote app server(WAS, JBOSS, not sure what we have for .net and flex) to deploy app.
4. Give me output that it's done or a problem why it wasn't deployed.

So, I want to have a simple webapp which will allow me to choose server and task. Based on selected option I will build and deploy app1 on env1 and so on. Problems:
1. Currently, we are using svn, but starting next week, all code repos will be moved to clearcase. I'm not sure how I can access code from new app, I used svn plugin for ant and maven but not for ClearCase quick search gave me plugin for maven, but still I've no clue how that clearcase integration should work. Any ideas?
2. Any tips about how work flow described above can be made? If somebody already done that before, can you share your ideas of how it could be done?

Thanks!

[Wouter Oet]

About 1: I'm sure that that plugin as an faq. Doesn't that contain the needed info?
About 2: You could check out some Continuous integration servers such as Jenkins. That contains a lot of your desired functionality.

[Roman Burdakov]

Wouter Oet wrote:About 1: I'm sure that that plugin as an faq. Doesn't that contain the needed info?
About 2: You could check out some Continuous integration servers such as Jenkins. That contains a lot of your desired functionality.

Thanks for your reply. This is how I solved this problem last month, and I just had an update to change ..but first what I already did:

1. ClearCase. I stuck here a little bit. I was able to write a part of my app which was responsible for updating existing view on local build server, but now I need to do it right way.
2. I actually wrote a small app before which I was using as fast tool for deployment. I already had code checked out on my local machine from SVN and I only run <build-app-tool> with certain parameters specific for building app. This tool called maven or ant scripts, get the *.ear, *.war file from pointed location, by means of scp upload it to the remote enviroment and through the ssh called wsadmin.sh with jython script which deployed app on WebSphere. whole process took 2-3 min (for build/upload 30 mb file/deploy) compare to 7-15 min for uploading file manually through putty, and getting into web console on test environment and uninstalling/installing app, sometimes even with restarting app server. Jenkins could probably work in this situation, but I'm not going to make huge changes on a project where I stuffed only for 9 month. Nobody will support this idea. . I'm just trying to help as much as it possible now.
3. JBoss and Tomcat didn't test yet...they only used on some dev workstations.
4. Logging. I will add email notifications if anyone will be interested in monitoring this.

Now, I'm up to fix clear case part. I need to get snapshot of a particular stream if it was checked in on build server. I need to get latest and greatest code from program and execute the rest of steps to deploy it on remote environment.