Test Driving Server Configuration and Deployment

Tests take some of the uncertainty out of deployment

As developers, server administration is always "fun", by which I mean, a process full of uncertainty and surprises. My aim during this chapter was to show a functional test suite can take some of the uncertainty out of the process.

Typical pain points—​database, static files, dependencies, custom settings

The things that you need to keep an eye out on any deployment include your database configuration, static files, software dependencies, and custom settings that differ between development and production. You’ll need to think through each of these for your own deployments.

Tests allow us to experiment

Whenever we make a change to our server configuration, we can rerun the test suite, and be confident that everything works as well as it did before. It allows us to experiment with our setup with less fear.

-- Harry Percival