Leightweight tools for automated svn update + some scripting

[Thorsten Schöning <ts...@am-soft.de>]

Hi all,

I'm doing a bit research for our somewhat small company how to best
update home grown services, web applications and configurations on
production and testing servers. We have only few of them, but many
more working copies all over the place with various layouts, some
applications even consist of independent wcs in different folders for
historical reasons and such.

There's a lot of tools available around the subject "continuous
delivery", things like Puppet, Chef etc. are mentioned very often, but
all of those look very heavyweight to me currently. Some come with
their own web server, database, need "configurations" implemented in
programming languages we have no experience with, are really bad
debuggable locally and whatever... What I'm currently more interested
in is something between doing things manually and such things like
Puppet, because I don't seem to be very good at finding such software,
if it exists.

What I would need is something polling some repos, like commit
monitors, only server based without GUI and such, and on commits
updates some working copies. Additionally, I need to be able to at
least restart services. I guess this covers around 95% of my use
cases and reads like some flexible commit monitor and a scripting
interface, but I hope that maybe some of this scripting could be
avoided and replaced by really simple configurations. Of course this
would only be useful if such an application doesn't bring it's own web
server, database and Ruby runtime environment...

Do you know of something like that available? Thanks!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Thorsten Schöning

-- 
Thorsten Schöning       E-Mail: Thorsten.Schoening@AM-SoFT.de
AM-SoFT IT-Systeme      http://www.AM-SoFT.de/

Telefon...........05151-  9468- 55
Fax...............05151-  9468- 88
Mobil..............0178-8 9468- 04

AM-SoFT GmbH IT-Systeme, Brandenburger Str. 7c, 31789 Hameln
AG Hannover HRB 207 694 - Geschäftsführer: Andreas Muchow

Re: Leightweight tools for automated svn update + some scripting

[Eric Johnson <er...@tibco.com>]

As Joseba indicated, try Ansible. Salt Stack also has an "agentless" mode.

I use Ansible to deploy / configure Subversion and mirrors.

And of course, then you can track your configuration changes in version
control.

As this question is somewhat off topic from this mailing list, I suggest
learning more about Ansible & Salt Stack, and asking in the appropriate
forums for those.

Eric.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 8:01 AM, Thorsten Schöning <ts...@am-soft.de>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm doing a bit research for our somewhat small company how to best
> update home grown services, web applications and configurations on
> production and testing servers. We have only few of them, but many
> more working copies all over the place with various layouts, some
> applications even consist of independent wcs in different folders for
> historical reasons and such.
>
> There's a lot of tools available around the subject "continuous
> delivery", things like Puppet, Chef etc. are mentioned very often, but
> all of those look very heavyweight to me currently. Some come with
> their own web server, database, need "configurations" implemented in
> programming languages we have no experience with, are really bad
> debuggable locally and whatever... What I'm currently more interested
> in is something between doing things manually and such things like
> Puppet, because I don't seem to be very good at finding such software,
> if it exists.
>
> What I would need is something polling some repos, like commit
> monitors, only server based without GUI and such, and on commits
> updates some working copies. Additionally, I need to be able to at
> least restart services. I guess this covers around 95% of my use
> cases and reads like some flexible commit monitor and a scripting
> interface, but I hope that maybe some of this scripting could be
> avoided and replaced by really simple configurations. Of course this
> would only be useful if such an application doesn't bring it's own web
> server, database and Ruby runtime environment...
>
> Do you know of something like that available? Thanks!
>
> Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
>
> Thorsten Schöning
>
> --
> Thorsten Schöning       E-Mail: Thorsten.Schoening@AM-SoFT.de
> AM-SoFT IT-Systeme      http://www.AM-SoFT.de/
>
> Telefon...........05151-  9468- 55
> Fax...............05151-  9468- 88
> Mobil..............0178-8 9468- 04
>
> AM-SoFT GmbH IT-Systeme, Brandenburger Str. 7c, 31789 Hameln
> AG Hannover HRB 207 694 - Geschäftsführer: Andreas Muchow
>
>

Re: Leightweight tools for automated svn update + some scripting

[Daniel Shahaf <d....@daniel.shahaf.name>]

Thorsten Schöning wrote on Fri, Oct 02, 2015 at 17:01:56 +0200:
> What I would need is something polling some repos, like commit
> monitors, only server based without GUI and such, and on commits
> updates some working copies. Additionally, I need to be able to at
> least restart services. I guess this covers around 95% of my use
> cases and reads like some flexible commit monitor and a scripting
> interface, but I hope that maybe some of this scripting could be
> avoided and replaced by really simple configurations. Of course this
> would only be useful if such an application doesn't bring it's own web
> server, database and Ruby runtime environment...

There's svnpubsub.  In a nutshell, svnpubsub sits in the post-commit
hook and broadcasts the commit to TCP listeners, and svnwcsub is
a listener that runs 'svn update' and also has a post-update hook.

@all, do we have a good documentation of what svnpubsub _is_?
Neither https://subversion.apache.org/faq#website-auto-update nor
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/tools/server-side/svnpubsub/README.txt
actually explain what svnpubsub is.

Cheers,

Daniel

Re: Leightweight tools for automated svn update + some scripting

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nk...@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Thorsten Schöning
<ts...@am-soft.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm doing a bit research for our somewhat small company how to best
> update home grown services, web applications and configurations on
> production and testing servers. We have only few of them, but many
> more working copies all over the place with various layouts, some
> applications even consist of independent wcs in different folders for
> historical reasons and such.
>
> There's a lot of tools available around the subject "continuous
> delivery", things like Puppet, Chef etc. are mentioned very often, but

Note that chef can be much, much ligherweight if you use "chef-solo".
I'm fairly active on the chef-devel list, and have actually irritated
a few developers by pointing out the advantages of using the "chefdk"
toolkit to with a source controlled local setup to allow localized,
single host deployment.

Mind you, that's a case where the local repository and the ability to
use a local branch without ever committing back to a central
repository can provide some advantages to git over the centralized
Subversion style deployment, and where development can be done on a
private branch without ever committing problematic or possibly broken
code to the central repository, and a private fork can be merged or
pulled form several distinct upstream repositories. I use it that way
myself, and would find it quite difficult to do remote development
with Subversion rather than local git repositorites. But tastes very.

Subversion has real advantages for some things. Continuious
integtration in Jenkins, with ocassional debugging and patching done
live in the Jenkins build environment? Not so much.