Assembla FTP build configuration

For the best part of a year we have been using Assembla for all of our Nooku development. The first public example being the Nooku Developer Portal. Assembla is not only a great tool for our Nooku developer portal, we also use it for all our client projects. Assembla itself has a plethora of features, two of which are methods of deployment, a Build Tool and a FTP Tool.

The build tool utilises Capistrano and boasts some rather heavy duty capabilities. I have been testing this with Nooku Server, deploying to my own cloud server and whilst the setup is far more complex than a simple FTP deployment I can immediately see the advantages. For example the ability to run server side scripts allows for database updates to be run.

The FTP Tool is far simpler and is currently what we use on our Belgium Police project. For this project SSH is the only method of access to the staging and production servers. The FTP Tool provides for SFTP so this fits the restriction perfectly.

For this project we are also running a full development environment, that means Development, Staging and Production servers. For the development server the FTP Tool performs a deployment upon subversion commits, effectively providing a continuous build. For the Staging and Production servers we run manual deployments as required.

With this setup our developers are free to do what they need to without effecting the clients ability to test changes. When the time comes to apply changes to the Production server we will be able to do it quickly, with little or no downtime depending on the nature of the changes. The deployment configurations are all saved in Assembla so the process is a simple cost effective alternative to manual updates.

Not only is it a great project management solution, we found the Assembla to be very responsive to our never ending feature requests. Apparently this got Nooku on their radar: Assembla has chosen Nooku as featured Open Source project of the month.

“… a magnificent framework”

From the article:

Their developer portal is also a fantastic example of what’s possible with Assembla. They have made use of wikis, the portfolio tool, multiple subversion repositories, and the custom branding tool to make the look and feel of the portal fit the Nooku design aesthetic.

When we asked Johan why he chose Assembla, he said: “Assembla is one of best software management tools for community driven Open Source projects. It’s simple to use yet offers all the richness we needed to be productive from day one. It marries free and paid services together which is ideal for OS projects that expect to become big. Assembla will be key in helping us to grow our Nooku community.”

Alex Coisman, VP of Marketing at Assembla said:

“Some open-source projects have already sprung up around this fairly young framework (…) I’m sure even more Nooku-powered projects will surface in the near future, as Johan Janssens and team have released quite a magnificent framework.”

Read the full article at the Assembla blog.