DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Refcards
Trend Reports

Events

View Events Video Library

Zones

Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

How does AI transform chaos engineering from an experiment into a critical capability? Learn how to effectively operationalize the chaos.

Data quality isn't just a technical issue: It impacts an organization's compliance, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Are you a front-end or full-stack developer frustrated by front-end distractions? Learn to move forward with tooling and clear boundaries.

Developer Experience: Demand to support engineering teams has risen, and there is a shift from traditional DevOps to workflow improvements.

Related

  • Before You Microservice Everything, Read This
  • Power BI Embedded Analytics — Part 3: Power BI Embedded Demo
  • DGS GraphQL and Spring Boot
  • Auto-Instrumentation in Azure Application Insights With AKS

Trending

  • Asynchronous Timeouts with CompletableFuture
  • The Rise of Vibe Coding: Innovation at the Cost of Security
  • Building Custom Tools With Model Context Protocol
  • The Future of Java and AI: Coding in 2025

7 Application Deployment Best Practices

Someone just asked me to define “best practices” for a collection of application deployments.

By 
James Betteley user avatar
James Betteley
·
May. 21, 12 · Tutorial
Likes (0)
Comment
Save
Tweet
Share
37.9K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Someone just asked me to define “best practices” for a collection of application deployments. The question was impossible to answer because the applications we were talking about were all bespoke, so each one had good and bad ways of deploying them. It would take an age to go through each one and explain which is the best way of doing their unique installation operations.

However, I’ve given it some thought and I think there are still a handful of best practices for application deployments which can pretty much extend across almost all applications, certainly all the ones we were talking about. Here are some of what I would define as best practices for application deployments.

  1. Keep the installation structure SIMPLE. Files and directories should be kept to a minimum. Don’t install anything that’s never going to be used.
  2. Always get rid of old files. When something goes wrong on a production host, the last thing I want to be doing is trawling through random directories and copies of old files to find what’s gone wrong.
  3. Automate it – this almost goes without saying, but deployments should NOT be manual, there’s far too much room for human error. Use a tool for doing deployments, something that supports the native OS operations, like rpm using yum for RedHat. Alternatively, if you’re deploying to multiple different OSs, try using a scripting language to script the deployments.
  4. Don’t over do it with the symlinks. Use them only if you have to. It’s too easy to end up with symlinks pointing to the wrong place, or to break them altogether. It’s also a good idea for your applications themselves to rely on symlinks. I would rather enforce standardisation of the environments and have my applications use real paths than rely on symlinks. Symlinks simply add another level of configuration and a reliance on something else which is all too breakable.
  5. Delete everything first. If you’re simply deploying a new directory or package, completely remove the existing one. Take a backup if necessary, but delete that backup at the end if the deployment is successful. This is similar to point 2, but more robust. I think that if at all possible, you shouldn’t rely on sync tools like rsync/xcopy/robocopy to do your deployments. If your time and bandwidth allows, delete everything first and upload the complete new package, not just a delta.
  6. Have a roll back strategy. Things can sometimes go wrong and often the best policy is to roll-back to a known-working version. Keeping a backup of the last known working version locally on the target machine can often be the quickest and simplest method, but again I would avoid this option if bandwidth allows. I don’t like having old versions sitting around on servers, it leads to cluttered production boxes. I would much rather do a roll-back using the same mechanism used for doing a normal deployment.
  7. Don’t make changes to your deploy mechanism or deploy scripts between deploying to different environments. This is just common sense, but I’ve seen a process where, in order to actually deploy something onto a production server, the deploy script had to be manually changed! Suffice to say I wasn’t a fan of that idea.

As you can probably appreciate, this list is generally not written with installers (such as msi files) in mind, maybe I’ll look at that another time.

application

Published at DZone with permission of James Betteley, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Before You Microservice Everything, Read This
  • Power BI Embedded Analytics — Part 3: Power BI Embedded Demo
  • DGS GraphQL and Spring Boot
  • Auto-Instrumentation in Azure Application Insights With AKS

Partner Resources

×

Comments

The likes didn't load as expected. Please refresh the page and try again.

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Support and feedback
  • Community research
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Core Program
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • [email protected]

Let's be friends: